Studio work | using a 4½ feet long pencil | Jenny Saville
Making work in the studio with my large canvases, mark-making with a long pencil, and a look at Jenny Saville's art practice
It’s great to be settled back in my studio after the Lisbon adventures. Now it’s full-steam ahead with my large canvases.
Each canvas is square (100 x 100 cm). I like the square format because it allows me to decide on the painting’s final orientation very late in the design process. To the side of me is my inspiration wall - what interior designers call a mood-board or mood-wall. You can see my photo-grids and painting sketches from Lisbon displayed prominently. Having these in plain sight allows a sort of cross-over of colour and mark-making to come into my design choices.
At this early stage of production, I’m simply playing with colour combinations, and creating texture in the painting surface. Having a rough surface promotes chance and collision to create unexpected marks and colour combinations.
I love dynamic and atmospheric paintings. When I approach a work from a distance, I enjoy experiencing the broad composition. In looking, I seek to find a meaning. Then, as I move closer, I want a painting to reveal more and more. Up close, I like to see the artist’s hand showing me evidence of how the painting was made. Think about the works of Rembrandt, Monet and Van Gogh; but more relevant to us these days: think about the works of Cecily Brown, Maggi Hambling, and the awesomely talented Jenny Saville (fig. 1).
If you look closely at the detail in Jenny’s Prism painting you’ll see how the lines are layered, one over another, and from your analysis you might estimate how the artist moved to make each mark. You can sense the energy and movement of the artist’s hand. But hold on … our digital screens belie the actual size of this work: it’s over 6 feet high, and 5 feet wide. Will this knowledge change our ideas about how the artist created those lines?
We can get an insight from Jenny, from when she talked to Nicholas Cullinan (director of London’s National Portrait Gallery). She gives us some clues.
“Painting on the floor is good because it takes away your conventional skill and ability to see. The material itself is playing with gravity and I make marks and merge paint with a certain energy. It’s like a way to trap nature; to hold on to a sense of time.
When you crash or slide colours together they are forever frozen in that moment. I find that visually thrilling. Then when you build form off that moment—like a nose, for example—it creates a visual shock. It’s a game of contradictions, of building and destroying, or of being conscious and letting go as a way to access greater reality.”
Jenny’s words made me think about my own drawing processes, and I recall some work from 2020 - I taped a pencil to a 4.6 feet long bamboo stick for a still-life drawing of an Orchid. At that time, I was experimenting using super-elongated pencils to make still-life drawings. You might be interested in watching a video clip (it’s only 2 minutes) and I’ve included some of my thoughts about the drawing process.
Taking my lead from Jenny, I put my canvases on the floor and taped a Stabilo Woody to the end of the bamboo cane and experimented with more mark making. (It was also a good time to learn more about editing video using my Insta360 camera).
I love this technique. Over the coming weeks, I’m going to experiment with other tools taped to the cane. This is going to be fun 😁
Next time …
I’ll continue working on the three canvases, so I hope to show some updated images. Also, as it’s a year since I visited the Uffizi Gallery, I’ll look back to some candid video work I made there.
List of Illustrations
Fig. 1 Saville, J. (2020) Prism. [pastel and charcoal on canvas] 200 × 160 cm. At: https://gagosian.com/quarterly/2020/12/01/interview-jenny-saville-painting-self/ (Accessed 30.05.2023)
Bibliography
Cullinan, N. (2020) Jenny Saville: Painting the Self. At: https://gagosian.com/quarterly/2020/12/01/interview-jenny-saville-painting-self/ (Accessed 30.05.2023)
About me
My name is David Bell and I’m an artist living in Sanremo, Italy. I write this blog for my band of supporters, giving an insight to my art and life generally living on the beautiful Riviera of Flowers.
Ciao4now … alla prossima.