Artists

Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville’s monumental paintings wallow in the glory of expansiveness. Jenny Saville is a real painter’s painter. She constructs painting with the weighty heft of sculpture. Her exaggerated nudes point up, with an agonizing frankness, the disparity between the way women are perceived and the way that they feel about their bodies. One of the most striking aspects of Jenny Saville’s work is the sheer physicality of it. Jenny Saville paints skin with all the subtlety of a Swedish massage; violent, painful, bruising, bone crunching.

(Interview with Jenny Saville by Simon Schama)

Saville's work is very expressive. I find her work overwhelming. It is unlike anything we see advertised or in the media. It is unlike the picture of perfection we try to paint in our minds. It is not like the signs we see everywhere saying 'I am perfect and beautiful. Why aren't you?' It is for this reason I love her work. In other cases I find her work almost repugnant. In this case, the transexual paintings. They seem so unnatural, I can't seem to wrap my mind around it. Her artwork seems to exaggerate pain and how woman perceive themselves, as grotesque and overweight. Why do woman feel uncomfortable in their own skin? Why do they strive towards perfection? Because, we are told we are not good enough, we are told we should be perfect. 

Louise Feneley 

"For Feneley, the translucent intimacy of folded fabric becomes the threshold into another reality, wherein the contemplation of the universal in the particular, the transcendent in the banal, drives a project in which the creative and sensuous process of painting itself becomes a material expression of a meditative state, an alchemic engagement with the material that, in her words, 'propels transcendence into being"

Dr Ian Greig, 2004

Feneley's painting's caught my eye because of the ingenuity of the fabrics folds and colours. I loved its emotion, light and reflective. Absolutely diverse to Saville's pieces, as her artworks intention is to shock you. Feneley's artwork reminds me of a rose in the way it layers and of its shades. If it were rotated it would still be beautiful, in fact I think I like it on its right side better :). It's soft nature doesn't not stir unwanted emotions, as Saville's artwork tends to, it instead gives a sense of calm.

I am thinking these will be my artists for my assignment draft, because of their difference and how they explore totally different concepts. I love both artists style and aesthetic.