STRANGE to think there was a time when Jenny Saville, one of Britain’s foremost artists, could have been prosecuted for her distinctive work. She told The Herald in March 1994 (the above photograph dates from 1992) that she had been banned from a Glasgow Southside branch of Boots’. “They said they’d prosecute if I took another film in [to be developed]. Said I was sick; disgusting.’’ The Glasgow School of Art graduate, then 23, used photographs to help her paint her riveting - nude, fleshy - figures, which had attracted considerable attention at London’s Saatchi Gallery. ‘’I find working from photographs much better than using a model. I use myself as the subject because it’s easier. Anyway, no-one else will pose!’’
Saville was elected to the Royal Academy in 2007 and has staged numerous influential solo shows here and abroad. Last year her recent drawings were exhibited at a London gallery, which said of her: “Over her twenty-five year career, Saville has taken the depiction of the human form in unprecedented directions.” Asked by a journalist about the “gentleness” detectable in the drawings, she said: “I can’t say I’m wiser; I’m probably more foolish. But I think I’ve accepted that making things that are beautiful is interesting, whereas before I was not interested in beauty at all. I was anti-beauty, I would say. I like that something reveals itself slowly, it doesn’t have to shout it. That’s shocked me.”
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