Jenny Saville, photographed in her Oxford studio, June 2012. (Photograph: Pal Hansen for the Observer) Some memorable quotes about Jenny Saville from an article in the Guardian last year, Jenny Saville: ‘I want to be a painter of modern life, and modern bodies’: *** Painting is my natural language. I feel in my own universe […]
Jenny Saville
- Art
- ...
The Facts and the Truth: Lucian Freud at the National Portrait Gallery
Benefits Supervisor (“Big Sue”) Resting “There are facts,” the painter Lucian Freud once said, “and there is the truth.” The current exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London follows less than a year after Freud’s death at 88. The show is a stark reminder that while Freud dealt with the facts of our all-too-human […]
Hitting High Notes
After the St. Francis Dam Concrete mostly, fractured spans of handrails in their new rust, insistent brown rabbits. Downstream from the floodwave, now someone’s house, green lawn, the sun thick with its own agenda. More rabbits. Ghosts from here to the ocean though I know days aren’t made from holding back and watching bunnies. To […]
I See Trembling
In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble. This quote by de Kooning came to me by way of my friend […]
- Art Making
- ...
Truth, Lies and Dodges
I had a conversation yesterday with LP (Lisa the Poet) about speaking the truth whether it be in poetry or in the visual arts. She went to the same lecture by Jenny Saville that I have written about here (although at the time we did not yet know each other) and felt immediately at home […]
Subservient to Painting…More on Saville
I’m still on a Jenny Saville bender (see post below)…Here are a few passages from an interview with Saville conducted by Suzie Mackenzie of the Guardian. I found these passages provocative and insightful. She attributes the early “fascination with fat” to sitting on the floor watching her piano teacher. “From below she had these big, […]
Jenny Saville in Boston
Saville uses her own body for most of her paintings This week we heard painter Jenny Saville speak at Boston University. Thirty minutes before the lecture was scheduled to begin at Morse Auditorium, 500 people were already in a line snaking down Commonwealth Avenue. My initial reaction was, how cool. How often do you find […]