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October 23, 2005
What is it about the body that I crave?
What is it that drives me to paint?
What is it I haven’t found yet?
thinking time between transferring a drawing to the panel and starting on the underpainting
Some would say I won’t know till I find it, but that’s a bit like saying turn right at the last set of traffic lights. It’s alright when you know the turning – you know that they’re the last lights, but on the first journey, well, there’s no knowing. There was a message on a blackboard on Maidstone station in 1986 “THE LAST TRAIN TO LONDON WON’T BE LEAVING” which throws us into a semantic head spin and swerves dangerously close to temporal physics [but a long way away from why I paint which is where, if you remember, we came in.]
Suzie Mackenzie talks to Jenny Saville in the Guardian: “What interests her is wherever the body breaks open - the genitalia - and, most particularly of course, the head, the face and all its openings.” Jenny Saville is a painter of the body and without a doubt a very good one. She talks with confidence about what she is doing, or at least the direction she’s heading in.
Jenny Saville, Reverse, 2134mm x 2438mm 2002-2003
I have images in my head, of paintings I want to paint. But they are nothing like the images that appear on the panels after I’ve set about them with the big brushes and oileo. Odd that.
I love the body, the whole figure in all its wonder. And it’s easy to get pretentious when waxing lyrical. I can best express it in paint. It’s about the glory of laying up a few colours together which give me the feeling of form. It’s about the shape and form of the body and about the colour and texture of the oil paint.
underpainting of the figure, also know as bodycolour
Posted by john at October 23, 2005 09:41 PM