Contemporary British artist Jenny Saville was born in Cambridge in 1970 and is most famously known for her larger than life art pieces of 'obese' women, usually using herself as the model. While finishing her postgraduate education at Slade School of Art, famous British art collector Charles Saatchi purchased her entire senior show and commissioned works for another two years. Saville became a famous artist when the controversial 'Sensation' exhibition at Royal Academy of Art (1997) brought Saville's work to the attention of the public at large. Saville has also exhibited widely all around the world including New York, Sweden as well as the UK. Saville is almost unusual among modern British artists in her dedication to the traditional art of oil painting. Throughout all her artwork, her subjects flesh is highly pigmented and she relishes each fold, protrusion, wound and discolouration. Since her début in 1992, her focus has remained on the body. Her published sketches and documents include surgical photographs of liposuction, trauma victims, deformity correction, disease states and transgender patients.
'Crop of Stare' (2003) features a young male boy he is portrayed to be servilely injured and hurt. The injured physical state of the boy is empathised through the colour palette of the piece of work. With various shades of pink and red represents blood and deeper tones of purples and browns showing bruising add a realistic
effect on the oil painting. I feel the colours used in this piece represent clearly pain and upset as the boy appears to be desperately in pain with injuries. The occasional usages of pale blue convey a hint of sadness deep within the boy as the colour has been slightly covered by the 'bruises' and 'blood'. In this piece of work there is evidentially an underlying psychological underplay with sexual politics featured. The painting is an emotional overload and is very empowering and unsettling. The erratic brush strokes and paint marks throughout the painting, creates the piece of work to not just be a portrait of brush marks specifically allocated in certain areas but to become an abstract piece. With this piece of work Saville purposefully wanted people to know what it is exactly they're looking at but at the same time the closer they get to the painting, its likes going back into childhood.
The brush stokes suggest a sense of chaos and anger as the marks express different emotions within the artwork. The strokes also add texture and charisma to the piece as the imply scratches and depth in the wounds. The painful image of the beaten young child is a heartbreaking piece and Saville has successfully created a piece of art which represents multiple things to each individual. Saville is painting a reaction to idealized beauty in her paintings and expresses angst through the flesh in a figurative manor. Throughout this one painting, aching and painful emotions lie within as she is challenging the viewer to look at deeper emotions that we don't tend to like looking at and she is telling us that when we see people breaking down due to intense emotion, loss of control and socially unacceptable body states).
In addition to this, I feel Saville is representing each individual as meat (objects) and that she is portraying the internal experience of these people and challenging us to see past their containers of bodies to see the human form trapped within itself.
In this piece of work, Saville used acrylic paints to create the layered usage of colours of a portrait of an individual. The colour palette of this piece of work consists of mainly different tones of red mainly featuring deep tones to represent wounds and blood on the subject. The main focus of this piece is the injuries around the face between the eyes and nose area which could portray a fight causing the bruising on the face. The brush strokes represent a harsh reality of anger and rage with is contained throughout this piece. The contrast in colours of pure white against deep red connotate's the purity the boy once was compared to the devil like being which is illustrated. I feel the erratic brush stokes portray successfully the pain and desperation lying within the painting and I feel using the medium of oil paints to create the painting adds to the rustic feel of the piece of original work. Also, the drips of painting hanging from the face downwards conveys the sadness in the boy as he tries to shed the container of his body to be a free spirit and to be happy with himself.
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