Back to Paint--Thanks to Photos

Jenny Saville, 31, is one of Britain’s young art superstars, applauded for her wall-sized paintings of monumentally nude women.

Media accounts lend her career a fairy-tale simplicity. Born in Cambridge, England, the daughter of educators, she was discovered by influential art collector Charles Saatchi in 1992, shortly after she graduated from Glasgow School of Art. He commissioned her to paint an entire show for his London museum in 1994.

Saville then accepted a scholarship from a group of American collectors, who arranged for her to make photographs of women in the process of having cosmetic surgery in the office of a prominent New York surgeon. When she returned to England in 1995, the experience inspired her to do a project with a filmmaker and an award-winning fashion photographer who did the 1997 Prada campaign. The results are nude self-portraits, created with Luchford’s help, that go on view at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills this week.

Although Saville is not fat, she pressed her body against glass to create a voluptuous effect. The photographs were printed on the scale of large paintings, some more than 6 feet tall.

“The photographic experience reinstalled my belief in painting,” she later said. She subsequently shifted the emphasis to the surface of the canvas to generate more visceral impact. “Instead of using paint to illustrate an idea, I want to make you feel your own body.... I am trying to make paint behave in the way flesh behaves.”

She also says that her painting is not so much a critique of the body-obsessed culture as a demonstration of her affection for the painting of the Old Masters. “I’ve always loved how Velazquez and Rembrandt could make something splendid out of something very ordinary,” she once said.

In 1997, she had her first commercial exhibition. At the Gagosian Gallery in New York City, her paintings were sold out before the show opened--at prices of $100,000 to $150,000. Around the same time, her paintings were included in “Sensation,” the Saatchi-sponsored exhibition that embroiled the Brooklyn Museum of Art in controversy over art considered to be sacrilegious or overly sexual. Her nudes, however, seemed tame compared with much of the work lambasted by then-Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

Saville lives and works in her London studio with Paul McPhair, a figurative painter who has been her companion since their student days. She stopped in New York to see the Alberto Giacometti retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art before coming to Los Angeles for her show.

Question: Did you find a special connection between your work and the work of Giacometti?

Answer: The paintings stuck with me because I’m just finishing a painting of [English art critic] David Sylvester. I’ve been painting it for 18 months. Giacometti’s portrait of him is from 1960. It is interesting because Giacometti’s approach is so different from mine. I painted him from photographs, and though David is dead now, I started it when he was alive.

It is difficult to work on the [artistic] transformation of someone’s flesh who was alive at one point and now is dead. It is different from Giacometti, where you can see the intensity of the mark-making over and over, [his] trying to heighten the reality.

Q: But did you find any connection in the fact that you both work from the human figure?

A: I think the difference is that I am so interested in the flesh, in the manipulative textures of [paint]. Giacometti was more interested in the structure and form.

Q: With such strong accolades for your paintings, why did you detour to make these photographs back in 1995?

A: I didn’t make a conscious decision to do [them]. I was in New York to take photographs of cosmetic surgery. I would see the surgeon with his fist inside a breast for implant surgery, a real manipulation and distortion of the body in search of some sort of beauty. I became interested in what happened in the process. At the same time, I took photographs of my own body pressed against glass to make some paintings closely related to the surgery. I was having problems with the lighting and reflections, and Glen offered to come sort them out for me. That is when I saw the possibility of the photographs themselves. We didn’t have the intention of doing a project together, it just grew. We did four sessions over an 18-month period.

Q: Did you choose Luchford because of his background in fashion photography?

A: We talked about it. I was interested in fashion shoots, how they create the reality that makes up beauty. We had lots of discussions of how clothes are pinned back to accent the body. He was interested in the way I approach making art, and I was interested in how he made these slick images to sell an ideal.

Q: How did you manage to get yourself smashed onto the glass?

A: I paint [standing] on scaffolding, so I took floor off of it and put plexiglass where floor was. Gravity pulled my flesh downward and if I held the edge of the glass I could slide my body across it.

Q: Did you have any idea of what it would look like?

A: I’d been doing it before, but the lighting made an enormous effect on the undulation of the flesh. The crevices became much richer. Glen got the serene beauty of fashion as well as something quite visceral. That was the hope anyway, a mixture of the slickness of fashion with the way I treat the body.

Q: Why did you decide not to continue?

A: There is a crucial distinction between painting and photography. When you look at a painting quite close, you are standing in the position where the painter, Giacometti or whoever, made that mark. To me, there is something absolutely thrilling about that.

Q: Is there something thrilling about painting itself?

A: Absolutely. If I make six marks and something appears as the corner of a nose or mouth, although [it’s] artificial, if you do it in a certain way, you create a reality. You know it’s not a body. It’s pigment and oil on material, but it becomes a suspension of disbelief. It’s a physicality, you can only make a mark at the speed that your body can move. A photograph is the speed that you set the shutter. With a painting, it takes a certain time to build up a visual dynamic.

Q: Various critics claim that your paintings are Conceptual and not a return to representational, figurative painting. What do you think?

A: I don’t have this thing of trying to legitimatize a traditional way of painting, but I have a relationship to tradition. If you make a nude painting, you carry with you a history of the nude in painting, you are immediately connected to it. A photograph is not necessarily art. It might be advertising, it fits in lots of areas. As soon as you make a painting, you have a relationship to art. Painting is immediately fixed as traditional art. Sometimes I think [that’s] a hindrance, but I also think it’s a real strength that you have in painting.

Q: What of the critics who feel the need to rescue you from your allegiance to tradition?

A: I’m interested in things to do with science, tissue engineering, things that people would not connect to figurative painting, but for some reason, it has a connection for me. I want a level of representation in my work, but I don’t feel connected to [English painter] Lucien Freud in the way that everyone thinks I am.

Q: You have been painting oversized women for 10 years. Why?

A: To me, oversize is correct. I like bodies that are in the process of change. A bigger female body has a story of how it got that large.

Q: Do you paint from women who are that large or do you embellish?

A: Sometimes I’ll do sessions of photographing people or myself in the studio, then work from composites of those images and photographs from medical books or pornography. I tend to use bodies that highlight a kind of humanness.

Q: How do you feel about your subjects?

A: I think they are beautiful. I have always been visually attracted to different kinds of bodies. I can look at the body of a burn victim and find something that is beautiful.

Q: As a student, you did feminist studies at Cincinnati University in 1989. Does that still affect your work?

A: I don’t want my work to have a political agenda as such. I don’t make paintings for people to say we should look at big bodies again and say they are beautiful. I think that it’s more that they are difficult. Why do we find bodies like this difficult to look at?

Q: Did this work begin with questions you had about your own body type?

A: Probably. If you are a woman and live in the West, you can’t avoid it can you? A mixture of things growing up, like looking at your body in the mirror and some days you feel powerful in your body and others you want to hide. We are going through a historical phase where we like to have a lot of self-control.

Q: But the flesh in your paintings is not rosy and sensual. The pictures are quite tough.

A: They take me a long time and I go through emotional changes in making a piece of work. I usually make no more than four paintings a year. I want any contradictions I have--feelings about my body, looking at other flesh--I want that in the work. I want them to be full of contradictions.

I have this jarring thing between figuration and feminism, which most people didn’t think would fit together. I had to find a way to work with these things that seemed to contradict each other. I had these two notions and thought there must a way for them to coexist or to find form in both of them.

I think that is the underlying factor in all my work. An attempt to find out what it means to be female.

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“JENNY SAVILLE & GLEN LUCHFORD: CLOSED CONTACT,” Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills. Dates: Opens Saturday. Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Through Feb. 9. Phone: (310) 271-9400.

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Hunter Drohojowska-Philp is finishing a book on Georgia O’Keeffe.