i am sassa

Jenny Saville is a contemporary British painter.

That’s all I’m going to say about her really. Her background, education, awards, and all that can be easily googled if anyone is interested. Not to be flippant about her achievements, because there are many, and they are impressive. But I’d rather talk about how her paintings make me feel.

I first saw Jenny Saville’s paintings years ago, probably when I was in school, and probably in books. I think someone, maybe a teacher, told me to look her up. The details I don’t remember, but the emotions I do. Her paintings grossed me out, and I’m pretty sure I dismissed her as an artist I “didn’t care for”. Years later, I revisited her work. This time I was a teacher of advanced high school art students, and I was looking for artists to help inspire their work and get them thinking. This time, I do remember the specifics. I remember searching google images for her paintings, and clicking through them one by one.

You know how your feelings about the world, yourself, your perspective in general, they all gradually change over time? I’ll use tattoos as an example. Tattoos used to have derogatory associations, like with prison or gangs. People looked down on people who had them. Maybe you did at some point. Over time, they became more fashionable. More celebrities sported them, maybe you had a friend who got one and it was cool, shows about tattooing became popular…I’m sure you’re picking up what I’m throwing down. Changes in perception are usually gradual, maybe so gradual you don’t notice they are happening.

So back to me clicking through Jenny’s paintings. At first, they were still gross. They were hard to look at. Assumptions were really easy to make about them, ones I’m not proud of and try to steer clear of now. “Shock value” came to mind. I was dismissing her as cashing in on the grotesque. Click, click. Why do I feel this way? Click. What is it about these images that makes me feel disgust? Some of them seem completely abstract. Are there certain shapes that trigger this feeling? Is it something I’ve learned or is she triggering some old, pre-language disgust? Click. These are just bodies. Women’s bodies, but they look weird. Why are they disturbing? Click. Ok, that one is because she looks bloody, hurt. Click. Would I feel weird if I knew what I was going to see before I saw it? Is it disgust, or is it just surprise? Click, click, click. I’m not even sure what I’m looking at here. It’s all flesh, but some of it is contorted and zoomed in and I can’t tell what part of a body, or who’s body it is. Look at all those colors. The texture. The depth, the folds. It almost looks like fabric. If it were fabric I wouldn’t think it was gross. Click. I imagined seeing a photo of myself on the beach, building a sand sculpture, leaning down to fill my bucket with water. Ew, no, I don’t like that one, my stomach looks all weird and squished. Delete. I imagined Jenny Saville, diving into my digital trash can to retrieve it, zooming in on that weird squished part, and then staring at it for days on end. Painting it so big she has to stand on a ladder to reach the top. Mixing a palette of soft pastel tones, rich, beautiful paint. Click. This is just flesh, behaving like flesh does. It looks soft. Click, click. If I forget what I’m looking at, these are really beautiful and interesting. Why do I have to forget what I’m looking at to see them as beautiful? This is embarrassing, so don’t tell anyone, but I put my hand on my stomach and squeezed. I was sitting, leaned over staring at my computer, and my stomach was all squished up. Is that what she’s looking at when she paints? This isn’t supposed to be gross. It isn’t right that it’s gross. A few more clicks and I was crying a little. I felt moved. I didn’t want to just squeeze my belly, I wanted to shrink myself tiny so I could climb its form like a mountain. I wanted to sink into its softest part and fall asleep counting freckles, colors, and scars.

That whole scenario happened in the span of maybe ten minutes. It was an understanding, a change in perspective the likes of which usually take years. That’s not to say that any body image issues I had disappeared forever after that, but they lessened a LOT. And I never looked at myself the same again. AND…the wild part is, I felt all of this just looking at her work, without so much as reading a single artist statement. I’ve read and listened to plenty of what Jenny Saville has had to say about her work since, and a lot of it is very in line with those thoughts. She did, in fact, squish herself up to take reference photos. She actually smashed her naked body against glass, twisting and contorting her skin while someone photographed her. I’ve thought so much about her paintings since I originally saw them, and why they made me feel the way they did at first. If I met and spoke with Jenny Saville, I’m sure I’d really like her. She’d be polite and shake my hand, like people do. She’s interesting and intelligent in her videos. How could a painting of her skin have ever made me feel disgust? It’s just a body, a woman who is more than a body, who happens to be all squished up. I think it made me feel gross because that’s not how we like women to be. It’s not how we are supposed to allow ourselves to be seen. We have diets and Spanx and even photoshop to help us make sure we aren’t seen that way. We are shown so many ads for how to remove scars and cellulite that it never occurs to us to look at those parts of us the way a painter does, or the way a child would, with curiosity. What colors do you see? What textures? Why can we apply this curious sort of looking to nature, to the flowers in our gardens but not to our own flesh?

Thank you, Jenny Saville.