Inspirational Artist Spotlight:Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville is a contemporary British painter, famous for large scale depictions of nude women. Saville gained her art degree at the Glasgow School of Art in 1992, but was later offered a six month scholarship to attend the University of Cincinnati’s DAAP program, where she states that she saw "Lots of big women. Big white flesh in shorts and T-shirts. It was good to see because they had the physicality that I was interested in"

After completing her post graduate degree at Slade School of Fine Art, Jenny quickly rose to fame when one of England’s top collectors, Charles Saatchi, bought the entirety of her senior show and supported for 18 months, while she created new works that he in turn displayed at the Saatchi Gallery in London. Shortly after her contract with Saatchi ended, Saville emerged as a Young British Artist (YBA) and is now widely considered to be an abject artist because of the controversial subject matter that she deals with. She credits that her feminist subject matter of nude obese women with often obscured or erased faces to her time spent in America, specifically of her time in Cincinnati at DAAP.

Since her debut in 1992, Saville's focus has remained on the female body, slightly deviating into subjects with "floating or in determinant gender," painting large scale paintings of transgender people. Her published sketches and documents include surgical photographs of liposuction, trauma victims, deformity correction, disease states and transgender patients.

Although Saville lives and works in Oxford, England, she has said that she prefers to show in America.  "It is odd to be showing in Britain. I've been shown a lot in America; that's my favorite place to show. We're quite conceptually driven in Britain. There's less guilt about being a painter over there."

My work is very similar to Jenny Saville, My work is also of a feminist subject matter, dealing with ideas of body positivity, body image, societal beauty standards and sexuality and I achieve this by depicting the fat female form in acrylic paint, digital mediums, pastels and colored pencils. I am really obsessed with the physicality of rolling flesh and portraying beauty in the things that much of society deems ugly. Saville works in a similar way, although her work is less about trying to change society like I am, but rather she portrays women because she is fascinated by them and their figures.