Jenny Saville is one of my favorite artists – for obvious reasons. I was sixteen when I first discovered the contemporary British painter, whose stylized portraits of luscious bodies captivated me. My college lecturer gave me a book on the artists’ work, allowing me to become even more enamored with Saville’s artistry. I was immediately enticed by the beauty, feminism, inclusivity, and textures that Saville uses to create realistic and dense portraits. There’s weight to her artwork. Not because she paints realistic nudes, featuring models with various body types, specializing in forms that vary beyond thin and emancipated, but that the physical mass of authenticity, self-possession, vulnerability, and normalcy is always present within Saville’s work. It’s the refreshing honesty in her work that makes celebrating Saville a delight in this often-superficial world.
It was 1998 when the love affair between Saville’s art and I began. Quite honestly, it’s an admiration that has lasted throughout the years. I remember buying a print of her artwork titled Propped at Camden Market and exhibiting it in my fashion cubicle at college. Back then, in the late 90s, the global message of body positivity hadn’t yet landed. If you weren’t excessively skinny and preferably tall, with waist-length bleach blonde locks that were straighter than an ironing board, and you didn’t have blue eyes or sport a marmalade-colored tan, then you were simply considered ugly. Society (and in particular, the patriarchy) didn’t allow room for imperfection. There wasn’t permission for women to be their authentic selves; to be fresh-faced beauties, freckled beauties, acne and scarred beauties, or aged beauties. Women who were muscular, strong, short, plump, and obese, and women who were disabled, hairy, or bald, were all the punchbags of society. Worse, there wasn’t room for women like me to exist; women who weren’t Scandinavian prototypes, women who are black, brown, indigenous, and altogether “foreign-looking.”
Then there was Jenny Saville. Suddenly, out of nowhere, there was a young artist filling canvases with body diversity.
Bodies that were average, normal, commonplace, and beautifully candid. Whatever Saville’s intentions were in creating portraits that displayed resistance to society’s destructive expectations of beauty, I don’t know. What I do know is that through her work, Saville gave women consent to be themselves. More importantly, she reinforced that beauty is both subjective and all-encompassing. Indeed, beauty is for all.
One day at college, I pushed my sketchbooks and fabric swatches from my desk into a drawer, deciding to write a poem to Saville’s Propped. Some creatives use music as their inspiration, some use art, and some use both simultaneously. In case you’re wondering, the album I listened to when writing my poem, beneath the watchful gaze of Propped, was Madonna’s Bedtime Stories. How so very 90s of me. My poem – untitled – was an internal monologue focused on exhibitionism and voyeurism, born from sensuality and sexuality, self-embodiment, and curiosity. It was about the liberation of self; a self that wasn’t necessarily society’s idea of attractiveness but a self that had pushed past societal pressures to unearth and connect with one's uniqueness. I loved that poem. It was mine – solely mine - written for me by me, written to the songs of a liberator while inspired by the art of another liberator. It was a poem of my raw existence; an unedited, unique, and physical exposure of my bruised and pigmented flesh, my full lips, thick thighs, and the scars that I hadn’t yet grown into.
Yes, Jenny Saville is abundantly talented. As a contemporary artist with a distinguished style, Saville’s recognized for reinventing the spectrums of painting nude forms, especially when considering female nudity. She doesn’t only create artwork with immense flair and talent, but she does so with a bold message that’s especially impactful to women. Both her work and her message are empowering, and it’s within that galvanizing and colorful empowerment that we find our own irreplaceable selves. Or at least, I did.
(Artwork by Jenny Saville)
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