‘Is it!?’
Not really, no. (Laughter)
‘No, it’s about eight or something … I’m supposed to be getting the lino stuff finished because that’s supposed to be being exhibited around the time the Atoms For Peace record comes out.’
Can you tell me that? Surely that’s supposed to be shrouded in subterfuge.
‘I can’t live the dream!’
A while ago you mentioned painting a series of portraits in oil. What became of them?
‘They ended up being the trees for King of Limbs! I was going to paint naturalistic portraits of the band because I looked at Gerhard Richter’s paintings and they were really good and I thought, “I’ll do that,” but, of course, I’m not Gerhard Richter; I couldn’t do that. It was not possible. Where he managed to get all these great blurred effects in oil paint, mine turned into mud, it was awful; very depressing for about three months … and then I started painting trees in oils in Oxford … and it all came about because of the way cathedrals used to be all different colours inside. Apparently all the vaults and tracery used to be painted really bright colours before the Puritans came along and painted over them white. All Northern European ecclesiastical architecture is based on the forest – being in glades, being in a sacred grove – they would paint their cathedrals in the brightest colours they’d got, absolutely beautiful. Going into a cathedral would have been like entering into an illuminated manuscript forest and I just thought, if all the trees of the forest were all different colours, how beautiful it would be … and that’s how King of Limbs came to be.
There you are, a rare moment of articulacy! You should put it in a special box with red arrows pointing to it.’
JENNY SAVILLE, RA (1970– ) is a Cambridge-born artist. Her visceral oil paintings and drawings of the human body are often realised on a massive scale and have appeared in exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Art, Gagosian Galleries and Norton Museum of Art, Florida. Her work has featured on the covers of two albums by Manic Street Preachers – The Holy Bible (1994) and Journal for Plague Lovers (2009).
Brewer Street, Oxford
26 January 2010
In light of Stanley’s eclecticism, I wrote to Gagosian, Jenny Saville’s gallery, and asked if I might have an audience with her since she seemed to represent the other end of the spectrum: a lone figure singularly preoccupied with painting flesh and the figure – solid, tangible, massive adipose studies of the body in oils.
The last I’d read, she was working in Sicily, so the approach was a bit of a punt since I wasn’t sure how I’d get out there even if she agreed to see me. However, it turned out Jenny had recently relocated to a studio in Oxford, so any thoughts of a Mediterranean adventure were quickly replaced with the more prosaic reality of a day return ticket because, to my surprise, she did agree to see me.
So one freezing Tuesday morning – satchel packed with a wine-stained notebook and a fickle Dictaphone – I caught a train.*
• • • • •
Jenny Saville’s studio is in a quiet shaded lane that belies its central city location. A two-storey building; grey-fronted and anonymous.
Lewis Carroll wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland at Christ Church College, two minutes from here. My rabbit hole is rather unprepossessing – an ashen door with a burnt-out intercom. I clatter at the letterbox and wait, stamping my feet in the cold.
Descending footsteps. Jenny opens the door and I step in. To my left is a room of large, briefly glimpsed drawings and charcoal pieces.
A set of stairs before me. We go up and Jenny makes tea.
The first floor is spacious and open plan, lit by large windows and greenhouse-like skylights. The walls are white. In front of the walls are paintings.
At the top of the stairs is a three-metre-high work of a newborn baby, the umbilical cord snaking back to a splayed vagina and soapy legs. Along from this is a trolley stand stacked with books – magazines, newspaper paint swatches, photographs and journals. Notes, clippings and articles are stuck up on the walls while other torn-out pages are filed out on the floor – creative ‘compost’ as Francis Bacon dubbed it.*
Empty cigarette packets, turned to display pictures of cancer and disease – bad teeth, laryngeal tumours, black lungs – are lined up on a dado rail.
Below the packets is a radiator that bears a painterly impression of Jenny’s bottom – a Rorschach test pattern.
The studio, as well as being large, is freezing and Jenny explains she can only work for an hour or so before she starts to seize up. The radiator is where she warms herself and takes stock:
‘This is where I stand, as you can see. I find that a cigarette is a perfect space to stand or sit and analyse what you’re doing – the length of a cigarette.’
Opposite the radiator are several explorations of a single subject – a face with a mangled mouth; eyes closed, taut waxen skin lit from below, rising from a writhing, exploded mess. There are three versions of this piece, a large charcoal drawing, a mostly monochrome painted scheme – some patches of intense red and peach/pine – and an enormous black and white painting, streaked and leaking, the running paint visible below the surface layer.
None of the three is explicit about what is going on with the mouth, the wound is elusive and seemingly out of focus – a flayed moment of abstract expressionism – a de Kooning maw.
The finished piece, Witness, has recently left the studio for a London show in honour of J.G. Ballard. I’ve just missed it:
‘I think that show’s a brilliant thing to do because he was going to write my catalogue notes several times and I’ve got a lot of faxed letters from him – these great rejection letters from Ballard. (Laughs) Whenever I was asked who I’d like to write the catalogue I would always say, “Ballard. J.G. Ballard,” but first his partner was ill and then he was ill and then he wrote a fantastic summary of my work but didn’t want to write the catalogue – I’ve still got that. Everyone I’ve told about it has said, “Oh, you’ve got to publish it” – letters from Shepperton. I’ve got a really good interview with him that I taped off the radio. It’s from just after he wrote Cocaine Nights and he’s talking about the internet. Claire Walsh, his partner, was telling me how they used to watch a site where you can see the migration of swallows, a camera follows them. That was his favourite thing to watch.’*
We sit down on a pair of paint-specked chairs and I ask about the studio, how long she’s been here, and the differences between here and her previous workspace in Palermo, Sicily.
‘In Palermo I had the guts of animals outside my studio window; the stench was amazing in the summer. That has an effect on the way you think about making work. When I first walked in here there was blossom on the trees and it had an airy feeling. I haven’t wanted to overload it so far, it’s quite pure for me to have a space like this with only the work and a few things up – normally the floor is a cascade of books, but they’re all still in boxes so I’ve quite enjoyed having a clearer head. I’ve noticed that, when I have a lot of reference material around, I tend to work a certain way, so I’ve tried to switch that around a bit and see what happens.’
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