Saturday, December 7, 2019

Reading 5


This article was about an artist named Jenny Saville, and her take on creating artwork as well as how it has evolved throughout the decades. Jenny Saville is a figurative painter who graduated from the Glasgow School of Art. Her paintings’ main purpose is to show the “contemporary consciousness of the experience of being in the world”. She talked about how in college, if someone painted figuratively, it was viewed as being “a little quaint”, and that she preferred big paintings and disagreed that “being figurative was quaint”. She carries this belief into her artwork, where she depicts interest in how the body can be manipulated through plastic surgery, construction of gender identity, and feminism as well as critical theory. One of the pieces pictured in the article titled “Propped” stuck out to me, because it features a naked woman who is sitting on top of a Singer-sewing machine. To me, this represented the idea that the woman was taking control of stereotypes, especially ones in the 1950’s that women’s purpose was to stay home, and that many women were expected to sew. The large woman sitting on top of the machine, to me represents her crushing gender stereotypes of a woman needing to be thin, and needing to focus on simple housework tasks such as sewing. Saville mentions that she ties to “find bodies that manifest in their flesh something of our contemporary age”, which I think is really interesting because she incorporates contemporary concepts such as plastic surgery into her work. I thought it was interesting how she talked about how her painting of plastic surgery was rarely understood when it was first displayed, and now it is always recognized because plastic surgery has become such a constant contemporary subject today, compared to when she first created the painting.

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