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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