An exhibition at the Foundling Museum in London looked closely at 500 years of portraiture to
explore how pregnancy was depicted — and not depicted — from the Tudors to
today. Portraying Pregnancy: From Holbein to Social Media ran from January 24
to April 26, 2020.
A giant
new work by Jenny Saville, Electra, 2012-2019, was especially made for the show and was being presented to the
public for the first time.
SALLY
MANN Is it true that you paint at night?
JENNY
SAVILLE Yes, I often work at night. There’s a different atmosphere in the
studio at night, more dreamy, and I often take risks in the work at night, so I
like to use that time. My studio is a five-minute bicycle ride from my house in
Oxford. So I tend to cycle back past all the colleges and drunken students.
SM I’m sure I would once have been one of them.
Well, I feel like I should mention that while I’ve been the subject of
interviews, this is the first time I’ve ever asked the questions. So this
should be interesting for us both [laughs]. Have you ever asked the questions?
JS No
[laughs]. But I do feel that even though we don’t know each other very well, we
actually have quite a bit in common. There are some surprising connections in
terms of subject matter if you look through the work. And also Cy Twombly is
such a pivotal character for us both.
SM I
don’t know how many times I’ve sat having a coffee or a drink with someone and
I’ve endlessly pestered them with my gadfly—too personal—questions. And now I
have permission to freely ask. For starters, I’m curious to know if you’ve ever
visited the back country of the American South.
JS Well,
not specifically. Apart from driving south to New Orleans, the farthest south
I’ve stayed for any reasonable length of time is Cincinnati [when I was a
student].
SM That
doesn’t quite count [laughs].
JS The
first time I ever went to America it was quite a shock. I flew the day the
first Gulf War started. There were yellow ribbons around all the trees. It was
a real culture change, and an exciting time.
I
definitely became more interested in fleshy figures from being in America. I
loved watching bodies in malls and at carnival parks. I was shocked at how big
people were and how frequently you would see big bodies. I was fascinated: I
could watch the way flesh moved around for hours.
SM Me too. That’s what Cy used to do as well. He
would sit out in front of Walmart and was unabashed about appreciating the size
of people.
JS I was
learning to paint bodies at the time, really getting to grips with how
beautiful and fleshy paint can be. Seeing fleshy bodies heightened that sense.
SM Well,
that discussion of oil paint and flesh has been part of the dialogue around your
work since the beginning. Was it you who said it felt like the paint actually
became the flesh?
JS
There’s something playful and fun in painting. I get a simple kick out of
seeing one color running through another, or making forms appear—out of making something
from nothing. I feel the same thrill in that process that I did as a kid.
SM A
natural marriage. You’re lucky. Do you ever paint with your hands?
JS Yes,
sure. Maybe not in such a free way as Cy. Once I’d seen his work, he helped
reinforce those feelings of freedom. I was painting figures, working out how to
do that, and then I’d go and see Cy’s latest paintings, and they would blow me
over with their confidence and tactility.
SM He
was so physical and gestural.
JS One
moment with Cy that I remember fondly was being on a plane with him and ripping
pages out from a magazine because we both thought the colors were just so
exciting. I just found an easy relationship with him, because our conversation
slipped seamlessly between high art and everyday things. I recognized the way
Cy had an interest in the simplest things, and that gave me tremendous
confidence as an artist.
SM
That’s interesting about tearing out the pages, because he really was kind of a
magpie; like a bird picking up shiny, attractive things, Cy would find these
oddball images, tear them out, and stick them to his walls. Do you pillage
information the same way?
JS Oh
yes, sure. I have collections of images of stains and shadows, war photography,
graffiti, bits of material, paint swatches. The iPhone has made collecting
visuals so easy. I don’t know how much explicitly goes into the work, but these
things nudge me in the right direction.
SM Is
that scavenging in fact related to how you work? Do you take pictures of
everything—from sculptures in a museum to a piece of gum on the bottom of your
shoe?
JS I
take a lot of pictures, yes. I like to work in that kind of suggestive visual
atmosphere. I work with a lot of images around me on the floor, because you see
forms upside down and I find interesting compositions that way. Everything I do
becomes a part of me and feeds into making my work. And my children have really
opened me up to new things and have given me back an enormous amount of
freedom. I admire their openness so deeply and I want very much to be able to
put that back into my work.
I grew
up in quite a bohemian family: my parents were well educated, and I had this
farm where I could just wander around all day with a knife in my pocket. And
now I realize that my level of creativity, the confidence that I have in my own
ability to create, is something they gave me, which at the time I didn’t
understand or think of as important. But now that I’ve got my own children, I
realize now what my parents gave me, and I actually realize how important that
was.
SM You
were quite young when you were first celebrated as an artist, you sort of
catapulted to celebrity at such a young age. Did that have any downsides? Was
that problematic in any way?
JS I
can’t say it was problematic, or even [that there was] a dramatic difference.
The best thing it did was make me value the things that have kept me steady in
terms of making the work. I’ve tended to move studios after big shows, and
that’s helped. After the Saatchi show, Young British Artists III, in 1994, I
moved to America; after my second New York show, in 2003, I moved to Palermo
[Italy], so that was fortunate, because I kept my eye firmly on the work. I
guess it depends what you need as an artist at a particular moment. Time is
everything for me; I’m always yearning for more time.
You also
received a lot of attention and controversy as a young artist with your
pictures in Immediate Family. I so admire the openness and Arcadian spirit in
those pictures, but was that controversy difficult to navigate? Especially
because they were your children?
SM Yes,
but I had removed myself completely from the art world when I was making that
work. I was living so far outside of it, I was more or less able to tune out
the controversy. To this day, I don’t particularly read art magazines; I barely
read the newspaper. I’m like you, I just work. Sometimes it seems to me that
other artists create their work with less effort, whereas it always feels
onerous to me. But I suppose that’s not really true.
Do you
paint your children at all?
JS Yes,
of course. Having children had the most profound impact on the way I make art
and see the world. Making flesh in my body, and the animalistic nature of
giving birth, affected my view of nature. The simultaneous realities I’ve been
trying to generate in my work over the past few years, the strata and layering,
came about through the drawings I made after having children. It opened out a
new way for me to create space and movement. What I enjoy about my children so
much is their freedom. They move their bodies without care or judgment, and
that’s a precious moment in life.
SM I
know, that’s the way my children felt about it too. It’s a shame that society
has a way of inflicting its censorious views, and when children feel that, it
gradually undercuts their convictions and confidence. I was lucky because my
children were very strong.
JS Was
there a moment when they didn’t want to be photographed or where you decided
not to photograph them anymore?
SM It
was more about a shift in the work. I’d photographed them for ten years and I
wanted to move on to something else. They never asked me not to photograph
them—at ages nine and ten, your children are probably still pretty open-minded
and free to work with. But there’s an age where I didn’t even want to ask them
anymore. They were always happy to do it, but we had all just moved on, I
suppose.
JS I
made drawings after my son was born, when he just didn’t stop moving. He was
this whirlwind of limbs and slipping torso as I carried him, which was so
exciting. A drawing of a singular body just didn’t seem enough to communicate
this torrent of human movement, and I wanted to get to the unsentimental truth
of those childhood years. But when I first showed my drawings it was suggested
to me that they could be controversial because they were images of children,
and that was a little bit of a shock to me, because I didn’t see them like that
at all. Was that the same for you when you were making those pictures?
SM Oh
yes, exactly. Exactly the same thing. And people thought I was being
disingenuous when I would say, “I can’t imagine what you’re seeing in these
pictures.” It’s ridiculous how innocent I was at the time, how unaware I was
about the cultural environment. And a lot of that had to do with my isolation,
which was not unlike the distance that you seem to be enjoying yourself at the
moment.
JS Do
you always work in series? For instance, I love those pictures of Cy’s studio,
but they happened over many years, and you were presumably photographing lots
of other projects at the same time.
SM In
the case of Cy’s studio, those photographs are unique in that they were free
flowing, they weren’t made with any greater project in mind. That’s not my
normal practice. I would just briefly alight in his studio every once in a
while and take some pictures, but I was always working on something else. I
never thought of the pictures in Cy’s studio as a body of work, at least not
while I was making them. They were just casual gestures of friendship when they
started. Early on, he asked me to take a few pictures, not in any professional
way, just in a “Why don’t you come on in and take some pictures” kind of way.
And over time it grew to be habitual. Every so often I’d stick my head into his
studio if I had a camera in the car, or if I had some color film, or if I had a
new funky lens. It’s funny how the less emphasis you put on a project, the less
you worry about it, the less handwringing you do, the more spontaneous and
vital and fun it becomes.
JS Yes,
it rises naturally, doesn’t it? I find if I work very hard and force myself
onto the work, it can feel like an arduous trek and [like] the paint is too
heavy. But I think it’s necessary for me to go through this process and show
myself what I can’t do or what I don’t actually like, so I end up releasing the
reins a bit and my next piece comes quite easily. I like the feeling when my
wrist opens up and goes floppy; then I know I’m painting with some kind of
fluidity. It’s a sort of fitness or nimbleness. What’s tricky is to keep at the
same pitch in the next painting when the going’s good. Maybe it’s just one of
those things you just have to go through.
SM I
know that exact syndrome. It is so true. Actually, my syndrome works like this:
my first one is often really easy, and then with the next one I’m a little more
self-conscious about it. But it doesn’t sound like that’s how it happens with
you.
JS Well,
it depends where I am with a body of work. I think that’s the way ideas arise
for new groups of paintings. My weakness is that I can sometimes contrive
paintings too much, and they run the risk of being mannered. That’s not my
intention at all but a risk that I know I have to go through to try and do
something in figuration. So most of the time I make paintings that show me what
I can’t do, and that’s annoying but inevitable. Then, in a body of work, once
I’ve got through this novel and heavy phase, sometimes I get the chance to make
some good paintings. I have to keep going. I’ve learned that spontaneity is
important when working with models, especially groups of bodies, because when
people interact they create forms that I couldn’t imagine before they arrive in
my studio.
SM That
sounds very similar to what you just described about watching your children.
JS Yes,
just appreciating your instincts. That confidence has grown over time—just
doing it and building up a language, a vocabulary.
SM Well,
as you know, I’m not a painter, and what I do is so completely different and so
technical that I don’t get to do that kind of graceful, physical movement that
painters do. I’m so jealous.
JS That
technical side of photography would just nag at me too much. Most of what I
like in painting is through mistakes or the unintentional: an oil stain on
newspaper that has such presence, a mix of paint on my palette rather than on
the painting. With photography don’t you have to be so well behaved?
SM Well,
yes, but that’s not always true, and experimentation is actually one of the
greatest joys for me. A good example is my wet-plate-collodion work, because
you can allow these serendipitous accidents to happen, and it completely
transforms—
JS Yes,
of course, that’s much more like a painting, isn’t it?
SM Oh,
much more. But some people move straight into the serendipity, or so it seems,
and they don’t do their 10,000 hours of technical work first. I think it was
Malcolm Gladwell who once suggested that 10,000 hours of practice is what it
takes to get good at something. Well, I’ve put in my 10,000 hours of hard,
technical work. And that’s one of the things I most admire about your work: it
is clear that you’ve put in that time as well.
JS Well,
if you do 10,000 hours of paint splattering, you would get pretty skilled at
that, like Pollock did. I don’t know, I’ve had conversations about this
before—whether you can go in, you know, at late Picasso, where he puts just
dots of paint in for eyes and it seems almost cartoonlike, but there’s an
absolute precision in where those dots go. That dot has hours and hours of
painting behind it. It’s the same when you look at Rembrandt—you can see this
incredible abstract move of the wrist with the right amount of pressure and
ink, but of course it isn’t that simple—that move of his wrist has all the
other marks he’s ever made in his life behind it. It takes a lifetime to get to
that level of loose precision.
SM I
agree completely. I spent decades learning how to take a perfect photograph,
and then I was able to completely forget that and take any kind of picture I
wanted, because I’d put my time in.
JS And
that structure is behind you, isn’t it? It’s the backbone that you’ve got,
right?
SM
Exactly.
JS It
depends what you want to do as an artist. We’re lucky that we’re living in an
era with a lot of different areas of artmaking. I had quite an academic
training as an artist, looking back, and I was able to use that process as well
as kick against it. I have always aimed to make painting that deals with the
realism of our time rather than being nostalgic or academic. It’s not so easy
to eke out new possibilities if you work figuratively, because most of human
history has worked figuratively.
SM Of
course. Can we circle back to becoming a mother? Did you photograph yourself
giving birth?
JS I
did, I asked a good friend to photograph me. I loved all the incredible colors
and the intensity of that miracle moment. I was shocked by how much beauty and
violence there was—it was very primal. I have an impulse to record all sorts of
moments in my life, even something like the death of my father. When my father
died, I sat and watched life literally drain away from his body. I was shocked,
in grief, but at the same time was conscious of how beautiful he looked, and
felt compelled to want to hold that moment visually, because there was so much
life in that moment. I think that impulse to look and record has probably been
the backbone of my work.
SM Well,
yeah, and that brings me to this other issue, which is that there seems to be a
movement now that suggests that artists who depict suffering in a beautiful or
aestheticized way are actually harming the subjects. That it’s an ethical
violation to make a photograph or a painting of suffering, even if the result
is actually also a beautiful work of art. Perhaps Sebastião Salgado is the
perfect example of that. People are asking whether or not artists have the
right to look at and depict other people’s pain. I guess I’m just wondering
whether you have any feelings about that, because God knows we’ve both done
that.
JS When
I’ve worked with dead bodies, part of the interest for me was that I didn’t
know anything about that individual’s narrative. I found images in medical
books and made portraits from those. If you spend six months or more on a
painting, you develop an incredible intimacy by looking at the face of someone
again and again and working out their particular structure, from the turn of an
earlobe to the bones of their nose. It takes time and study to differentiate
between the specific colors and tones, and the colors were just incredibly
beautiful and related to nature, like in a sunset, but I was looking at bruised
flesh or a gunshot wound.
SM I
know all about that.
JS But
the beauty of it is dumbfounding. The beauty just knocks me over, and I saw
paint in that moment. I imagined what colors I would mix and how I could merge
them. I didn’t want to ignore that impulse to make paintings like that, because
it was so powerful. It’s similar to how we see war photography that’s
incredibly beautiful. You can’t deny its beauty. In Robert Capa’s pictures, the
blurriness of those soldiers’ landings on the beach in France: the blurring is
what makes not just the beauty but the tension. I wouldn’t want that picture
not to exist. That’s too puritanical for me, because the beauty of it helps us
accept our collective humanity, in all its shapes. Imagine not having Goya in
the world because he’d self-censored?
SM I
know, I’ve photographed a lot of dead bodies. And actually, when my father
died, I was with him at his very last heartbeat and I saw a perceptible change
in the color of his flesh. It was, as you described, very powerful and
evocative and provocative.
JS
Exactly, it’s a cycle, isn’t it? And you don’t want to deny looking at that,
because that’s powerful about your life. Like those pictures that you did at
the FBI death farm . . .
SM Yes.
JS It
must have been so powerful to be there and to see that, and similar in a way,
because you didn’t have a narrative for their lives, either. It’s like being a
pathologist, but from an artistic point of view.
SM
Exactly. But there’s a question—I remember it being raised with Joel-Peter
Witkin’s work. As I recall—and I may be mistaken about this—he went to a morgue
in Mexico, rented a corpse, and photographed it. The family of the dead man
were outraged and upset to find a relative in a publicly displayed photograph.
And I can see both sides of that.
JS
That’s a difficult situation, because those bodies were in a private context:
it sounds like they hadn’t been given to science.
SM It
is. Nobody in modern society wants this sort of raw scrutiny of our human
vulnerability. Because it’s something I’ve never been particularly afraid of, I
haven’t had too much hesitation about taking those kinds of pictures, until, I
guess, I get confronted by people who say, “You can’t appropriate our
suffering.” In my mind, I’m an artist. That’s what artists do. We speak to
these things.
JS You
have to work with yourself, don’t you? You have to just follow your instinct
and navigate that. I think that’s the only guide you’ve got. I always feel that
I have so much work to do. My studio is a vital place for me; it’s a universe
of trying things out and experimenting. Wherever I’ve worked in the world, I’ve
basically created a similar space and developed routines and rhythms around the
work. I have the very annoying habit of listening to the same music over and
over when I’m working on a particular piece. I enjoy these repetitive routines.
SM I’m
the same way. I really like a routine. I like the quotidian. I need to know
exactly how my day is going to be laid out. And I lay it out pretty much the
same way every day—I mean, right down to the food I eat.
JS That’s
so true. If there’s too much noise going on, I can’t process information. When
I’m in New York, Paris, or Athens, I love wandering around, seeing shows,
looking at what’s being made, watching people. I gather things up but I don’t
effectively process them until I’m back into an ordinary rhythm.
SM So in
a certain sense, you harvest stuff and then bring it home.
JS Yes,
exactly.
In Conversation
: Sally Mann and Jenny Saville. Gagosian, Spring 2019.
On
February 9, 2019, SFAI's Painting Department hosted renowned British artist
Jenny Saville in conversation with Claudia Schmuckli, Curator-in-Charge of
Contemporary Art and Programming at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Known
for her monumental paintings of flesh from a feminist perspective, Saville has
continually redefined the body politic in painting for the past 25 years. In
addition, panel discussions will be delivered on a range of subjects by artists
and professors in art practice and history, submitting their distinct
perceptions about the dynamic state of figurative painting.
The
painting symposium was organized by artist Brett Reichman, Associate Professor
of Painting at San Francisco Art Institute, and generously sponsored by XL
Catlin and The Broad.
Jenny
Saville in conversation with Claudia Schmuckli. San Francisco Art Institute, October 17, 2019.
British
artist Jenny Saville (1970), one of the Young British Artists, deconstructs the
stereotypes of beauty and eroticism of the female body as seen through art and
through men, and then broadens them. She experiments with obese women and
changes in the body, but above all she uses her own body as a model and means
of reflection. She reveals the natural beauty of the individuality of the women
she paints, and her own. Through the
body, she expresses states of
sensibility that bind us to our existence: uneasy, anguished, painful
fleshiness... This defines her artistic language as much as her traditional
pictorial technique. Figures are the sole focus of attention of her huge
canvasses, which often cannot contain the whole figure in the same way that our
selves cannot control our bodies. Her painting and her skill at drawing spawn a
multiplicity of realities that build movement.
We begin
our conversation in London surrounded by her latest drawings.
Elena
Cué: Your art is based in the exploration of the human body. This bodies
experience anxiety, strangeness, sorrow... Do you recognize yourself in your
multiple representations?
Jenny
Savile: I think you are in everything that you make, to be honest. But I like
to include everything, even to show sadness and violence. I want to encompass
the whole world when I make art, I don’t want to exclude anything. The best
work I’ve ever made has been through my instinct. When I try to be too clever
or too analytical, it doesn’t work. I don’t ask myself too many questions during
the making of the work because I follow my instinct. It holds a truth which is
greater than the truth that I’m trying to get at through over-analyzing
something. That was a lesson to me quite early on - that there’s something
within that truth; that there are truths greater than knowledge. And if there’s
a knowledge, sometimes you have to let go and follow your instinct to get to
that greater truth. If you over-analyze or over-critique something, there’s
almost no point in doing it. There’s no risk involved. I like the risk and the
change and the transformation that’s possible in the making, and for me, that
gets you to a greater art. It’s beyond reason. That’s what you’re trying to
get... truth beyond reason. Because if you could write it down or you could
speak about it, you wouldn’t need to make it.
The
figures in your drawings overlap as a plurality of identities. Your face is
present in most of your portraits. Is identity an important subject for you?
It’s not
really my identity... I lend my body to myself, that’s the way I’ve always
looked at it. But sometimes people aren’t prepared to put themselves into as
painful a position as my body is prepared to be in. I’ve been conscious - since
I was very young - that one day I’m going to be under the ground, I’m going to
be dust, I’m going to be nothing. So what’s the risk? There’s no real risk.
What could it be? Judgment? That I have a different body? That I don’t have an
ugly body? I don’t care about that. I care about trying to use my capacity as a
human. How far can I go as a human to make something that’s interesting? It’s
not really about whether it’s my identity or not. It’s about a human identity.
If you look at the Velázquez dwarf paintings, there’s an identity that goes
across all of humanity. Or a great Rembrandt portrait - it covers everybody.
I’m not an old woman in a Rembrandt painting; I don’t know what it’s like to be
a seventy year old woman, but I feel the humanity when I look at that painting,
so that’s the way I’ve looked at it.
If my
body can offer me the ability to get to something interesting, then I use my
own body. If I can’t, then I work with somebody else. So it’s not about this
endless self portrait, it’s just that I’m available and it’s the ability to use
my body to say something or to get to the emotion that I’m trying to get at in
the work.
Where
does your interest or fascination for imperfect, violated, wounded or operated
on bodies come from?
I don’t
really know. It’s something I’ve had since I was a child. If someone fell over,
I wanted to see what had happened. It’s curiosity; I just have a curiosity for
that. It’s also an aesthetic interest. I mean, I’m not so interested in a kind
of surface beauty, I think there’s a certain humility to getting underneath the
surface of something or being prepared to show the reality of something.
There’s a humility involved in it that I find in the work that I like. If you
look at ancient Greek theatre or Greek tragedy, and you’re harrowed by the
emotions on stage and the extreme violence, somehow that gives you a humility
in who you are as a human being in the face of gods, or in the face of the
universe. You’re so small and nothing. I think that’s the drive, because that’s
the kind of art I like across the board - whether it’s in film or music - it’s
the art that touches that part of us.
You
spoke earlier about the influence that clasical artists from the past have had
on your work. There is also a carnal tradition on Western painting. What is
your opinion on art from other eras?
I’ve
naturally always looked at older art. Especially because if you paint the
figure when you’re young and you’re trying to learn, you’re going to look at
figurative painting. So I learned by looking at Titian, Velázquez, Rembrandt,
Leonardo, Michelangelo... I was very lucky as I had an uncle who, from when I
was eight, really taught me to look. Also, if you want to have a hero to look at,
choose a really great artist, because that’s your measure. You can think that
you’re great in the time that you live in, but you only have to look at really
great artists and you’re a long way from that level. I’ve held that very dear
to me, it’s become the backbone for the way that I work. However much I try,
I’m never going to get to that. It’s a long journey to try and reach anything
like that. And then I have had an interest that has switched or moved around...
I mean, I have a team of players around me who I’m in constant dialogue with -
artists like Picasso, Velázquez, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Titian, Tintoretto,
Rubens - and then I have other art which is ancient Greek sculpture that I
love, fertility goddesses from the ancient world, all of those. After I had
children, I wanted to find an art that felt like the rawness of giving birth. I
lived in Sicily for a long time, so being in Palermo around those myths and
ancient history really linked me to that and the myths of the ancient Greek
world... gods and goddesses and the power of fertility. So that seeped into my
work a lot then and it’s a big driving force in my work now, especially in the
drawings. A kind of creative urge. I’m much more interested in what the life
force is of a creative urge, or how to make something and destroy it and bring
it back. Through that cycle, which is basically a cycle of nature, you get to a
greater truth, or a more interesting area of the work. I only really managed to
do that through looking at ancient art.
You also
had a dialog, this time through an exhibition, with Egon Schiele at the
Kunsthaus Zürich last year. What held the most significance to you from that
experience?
The
whole experience was an amazing journey. As a teenager, I absolutely loved his
drawings... the honesty and the brutality of his drawings, of both himself and
the females that he was drawing. My aesthetic interest led me to Egon Schiele
at a very young age, so when I was asked to do a show together with his work,
it was a dream. It was an incredible dialogue.
In that
exhibition, the Schiele paintings were imbued with a strong eroticism. Is this
also an important subject for you, do you think it is implied in your work?
It has
become more and more important, I would say. Instead of erotic in a sexual
sense, I would say erotic in a life force or drive. That’s really vital to my
work, especially in the drawings, because of the way that I work now. It’s
almost like a performance when I’m working, so I do sessions of working for
four hours for example, where I draw lots of figures and they start to collapse
and then I build them back up again. And through that whole physical process,
like a game, new forms start to emerge from the nature of the drawing. So it is
a sort of game where you get lost, and through it, you’re almost sculpting out
a reality from the process of that moment. It’s almost like a dance or
something; you create things that you didn’t know were in you.
Instead
of one thing that represents what it is, when you multiply you get closer to a
greater nature. That’s become very interesting for me and I’ve only really
developed that in drawing because I can change so much and have several toes
interlocking, or a male body over the top of a female body and that suddenly
become a hermaphrodite. But I’m not drawing a hermaphrodite. I’m drawing many
bodies together so that the gender becomes fluid. So parts of the male body
become the female body, and that becomes really exciting because it almost
represents more what we’re like as humans, rather than these separate sexes.
We’re made up of masculinity and femininity, so those are the things that become
interesting by layering them up.
Do you
feel that you have a body or that you are a body?
Some
artists like Michelangelo worked almost with God working through him; he was
doing God’s work and there was a kind of divinity involved in it. God has been
slipping away for most of us, but when we make work, I’m interested in what the
drive is. When I’m working in the middle of the night and I’m trying to get to
something, am I working with a wager on God’s existence? I don’t make work for
an audience. I don’t make work thinking that I’m going to show this to an
audience. But it’s definitely a form of communication. So it’s almost as though
there is a third person involved, whether it’s God or whatever. That drives me
to go further in the work, and I don’t know what that is.
Are you
interested in the outside world?
Landscape
is hugely interesting to me. Especially the sea... I spend hours looking at the
water. I look at the way the light moves on the water. I get up early so that I
can see the sun come up. But I don’t want to paint landscape paintings. I’m
interested in all of those things. But I’ve never wanted to paint those
directly, like I have with the body. And actually, the older that I get, the
more closely related to nature I feel, or the more interested I am in depicting
that. My mediation is through the body. All of my work really has been a sort
of landscape; it’s the landscape of the body, or the architecture of the body
in nature, or the nature of flesh, or the way that light affects a body.
What is
art to you? What is your definition of art?
I would
say the ability to have freedom. That’s fundamental. I really believe in
imagination and inventiveness. It’s a combination of factors including
humility, incredible hard work - it’s going to take a long time to have any
kind of mastery in this - plus being brave enough to take a risk. When, in the
work, if I’ve made something look really good and I sit back and think that it
is looking good, that’s the moment that I try to destroy it, whereas before I’d
polish it off. Now I’ll say well, that was easy access, or an easy journey to
get there. Where else can you go? If you’re prepared to do it, you can get
somewhere far greater. That takes a lot of hours and a lot of risk, but you’ve
got nothing to lose. Why not try to invent something? I have learned through
Picasso that the really good art lies in the ability of not knowing how to do
something. And the journey of trying to articulate something you don’t know how
to do is where the art is. If you know the journey that you’re walking, in a
way there’s not much point in walking that journey. It’s in the struggle of
trying to articulate something that almost seems impossible, but you’ve got a
hint in your initiative to do it, or an instinct, and you follow it. That
struggle to articulate it is really where you can find something interesting
and Picasso is the artist I’ve found who can do that, so he’s really been a
guide for me in the last few years.
Interview
With Jenny Saville. By Elena Cué. Huffington Post, June 8, 2016.
Also interesting :
How to
be an artist, according to Jenny Saville. By Lexi Manatakis. Dazed , November
16, 2018.
About Jenny
Saville. Gagosian
