Branded 1992

Jenny Saville

Branded  (1992)

Oil and mixed media on canvas

82½ x 70½in. (209.5 x 179cm.)

Artist Jenny Saville was born in Cambridge, England in 1970. She received her BA of Fine Art with Honors from the Glasgow School of Art in Glasgow, Scotland. Her medium of choice is oil paint, and she uses this to layer the paint with thick brush strokes to give character and dimension to the skin of the bodies she paints.

Jenny Saville is one of the female artists of the late-20th century who has truly reinvented the self-portrait. “Her work is a textbook example of the way contemporary women artists have expanded the self-portrait tradition, in this case to raise questions about accepted ideals of beauty in fine art and life”. She challenges the male fantasy of the perfect body and opens doors to alternative notions of beauty.

Saville fights society’s ideal of the perfect body by showing her own enlarged and distorted body, which becomes the opposite of the skin and bones we see on the covers of magazines. In many paintings, she uses her own head and face and the body of an obese woman. "Jenny Saville has visualised her concern about the tyranny wielded over women by the fantasy of the perfect body in a series of larger-than-life-size nudes overlain with contour lines, words, and the kind of marks made by plastic surgeons in preparation for their cuts.

As well as addressing perfection, she also addresses imperfection.

Both of the following paintings are perfect examples of the freedom of the modern artist to explore the reality of the female body. No longer is the female body an object to view; it has become a vehicle to express ideas and emotions and to ignite introspection about the viewers own ideas and emotions surrounding body image. "Saville originally began making her large-scale painting of female nudes by using photographs of parts of her own body to explore the role of model and artist at the same time. Both seductive and disturbing, Saville's images present the female nude pushing out towards the viewer, rather than being safely contained within a frame" (Phelan and Reckitt 187).

"Branded" is one example of Saville using her own face on top of her enlarged body. Here, the obese body is raw and shows every imperfection. The body is inscribed with words such as "delicate," 'supportive,' 'irrational,' 'decorative,' and 'petite.'

Saville has used very raw colours, she uses these colours to show others how they see bigger bodies and scars, this means that when others see it they think its unattractive or ugly, so Saville uses the colours to create a dirty body and a dirty background, it takes a brave confident person to show their own body to everyone, Saville is saying to us how it doesn't matter if you're big or small or you have scars on your body, if you're confident with yourself and love your body then people are going to accept you for who you are, today's society/media tells us how they think we should look, when really we shouldn't look like anyone, we should be original, ourselves.