Jenny Saville is a British artist who paints chunky, bruised looking nudes in a manner reminiscent of Lucien Freud, or so say many people:
She sometimes uses colour harmonies, and the visceral potential of oil paint, to make images that seem to play with suggestions of violence:
Jonathan Jones, art critic for The Guardian newspaper in the UK, wrote something on his blog last week asking a form of the question that I asked above - what to make of Saville's work? It sparked an interesting discussion on Alan Sundberg's G+ and Facebook page amongst different artists (link here).
Most people in the discussion so far come down on Saville's side. I'm on the contra side, mainly because I think she uses her great skill in the service of quick effects. As I write this, I think that traces her line of descent not only from Freud, but also from Euan Uglow, another twentieth century British painter:
In each case, both Freud and Uglow have much more patience with their subject matter than Saville has. Yet I accept that there are people who love her, and would completely disagree with my response. Like all value judgements concerning art, how does one move beyond entirely subjective positions?
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She sometimes uses colour harmonies, and the visceral potential of oil paint, to make images that seem to play with suggestions of violence:
Most people in the discussion so far come down on Saville's side. I'm on the contra side, mainly because I think she uses her great skill in the service of quick effects. As I write this, I think that traces her line of descent not only from Freud, but also from Euan Uglow, another twentieth century British painter:
In each case, both Freud and Uglow have much more patience with their subject matter than Saville has. Yet I accept that there are people who love her, and would completely disagree with my response. Like all value judgements concerning art, how does one move beyond entirely subjective positions?
Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader