Showing posts with label Jenny Saville. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jenny Saville. Show all posts

Tuesday, 23 June 2026

Drawing : Proximities and The Sensing Self

 Outpost 221223


Drawings re-examine, explore the 'Body Boundary' its feelings between the world of the individual and the world. Drawings attempt to establish a common boundary condition between themselves and the outside world.


We experience architecture not by aggressively seeking it, but by dwelling in it.

Drawing is always a formulation or elaboration of the thought itself at the very moment it translates itself, makes itself as an image.







Proximities and The Sensing Self.

You see and hear things figuratively and at a distance. But you touch the actual thing. You can extend haptic perception with an instrument, in which case the 'feeling/sensing' moves out to the end of the cane. But when you extend sight or sound, telescopically or electronically you continue to see and hear figuratively and at a distance. 


Kinaesthesia a property of haptic sensing that allows one to sense the body motion (haptically) by detecting the movement of joints and muscles through your entire bodyscape. No other 'sense' deals as directly with the three dimensional world or similarly carries with it the possibility of altering the environment in the process of perceiving it. No other sense engages in feeling and doing simultaneously. This action/reaction characteristic of haptic perception separates it from all other forms of sensing, which in comparison come to seem rather abstract.

Body, Memory, and Architecture.

Bloomer, Moore.


Organism-Person-Environment

Affect Architecture : Sociological Inquiry. 

Architectural Body. 

Awakawa/Gins.


Caloricity/Corporeality.

The Dreaming Physical Body.


Poetry as a synthesis of human existence.

Novalis, Bachelard.


I've always loved encountering a Rothko, up close, they really hum through your body.

I like the spaces that a large scale offers.

I think of each mark or area as having the possibility of carrying a sensation.

Jenny Saville.


Bodily Boundaries.

Body-Image-Theory.

The 'Physical' Body is the private property of the individual, but the individual's Body Image is developed, socially and thus has a social property. The tendency to associate the body with physicality rather than image over associates the body with notions of privacy.

Bloomer, Moore.



Paint/Haptic Fleshings.

The Bodies She Paints.

Chadwick/Saville.


If Painting presents Being, the drawn line presents Becoming.

Norman Bryson.


Drawing : Bodily Transactions/Making Public.

Displaying : Showing Possession.







Possession, like a body is a feeling that calls on all the senses, but is the direct consequence of feelings that are confirmed haptically, in contrast to the more distant and figurative feeling that are experienced visually and audially.

Bloomer, Moore.


Drawing/Sensing Haptic Relations.

Situatedness through drawing produces the hapticity of the experience of seeing/sensing/feeling with the body. 



The Anatomy of The Body.

The Exposed Interior of a Painting. 

The Space between Abstraction and Figuration.










Having flesh as a central subject (what it feels) I can channel a lot of ideas.

I need my marks to construct the anatomy of the Body.

If there's a narrative I want it in the flesh, in the body of painting.

I try to find Bodies that manifest in their flesh something of our contemporary age.

I find having the framework of a body essential.

Jenny Saville.

Elpis. Gagosian Gallery. 2021

The monumental paintings explore the human body and its fascinating aesthetic potential. Saville's bold and sensuous impressions of surface, line, and mass oscillate between rational and irrational forms, capturing a unique approach to realism specific to the twenty-first century. The publication documents the twelve paintings in the exhibition alongside photographs of the artist's studio and reference materials, including snapshots taken by Saville. It also features a poem by Anna Akhmatova, whose work Saville learned about while she was in Russia, where she photographed many of the models pictured in the paintings.






Sunday, 3 November 2024

Drawing : Layers of relationships, intimacy and circumstance

Outpost 070324

Speculative Haptic Experimentation.





Oxyrhynchus.

Jenny Saville.

John Elderfield. 2015

Several new works are inspired by the ancient Egyptian rubbish dump at Oxyrhynchus, one of the most important archaeological sites ever discovered. Heaps of discarded documents and literature; fragments incredibly preserved are now invaluable. Greek texts as Euclid's Elements and the poems of Sappho are among the excavated papyri.

Saville alludes to this history through a deep layering of paired subjects, faces, torsos, and limbs overlap with shadows and reflections creating palimpsests of living bodies and ancestral apparitions. Silhouettes drawn in charcoal through the surfaces of oil paint underscore the motion of the central embracing figures, while evoking the timeless process of sketching.

Time, figures, and carnality is further compressed by Saville's adaptation of various historical approaches to portraiture. From De Kooning's fluid abstractions of the female figure, to the almost combined couples of Picasso's late paintings and Japanese Shunga prints.


These intermediate studies echo the shifting status of the unearthed papers, once discarded now treasured. The depth and density of things now excavated from their surroundings are now brought into thinner layers of relationships, intimacy and circumstance. Saville's own figures merge ethereally with settings that have been loosely appropriated from photographs and evoke the backdrops of Renaissance Paintings.

 

The Human Clay.

The School of London

On Drawing, John Berger.


Michael Grimshaw.

40 Drawings 1968-1995


Drawing is the architecture of the spirit.


The drawings in this exhibition track a progression, both chronologically and through shifts of language. Inevitably there are tangents and seductions.

The more I draw the more I discover that drawing is really an echo of our being. Its sound, its voice is beyond ideas and runs all reason ragged.

I was interested in drawing 'ordinariness' because nothing seemed more interesting or as magical. This feeling is still no less dull than it was then.

The dense, mysterious spaces and shapes of her paisley dress terrified me and her shifting, speaking head was so impossible to understand as I sat in front of her on the carpet in an urgent and perplexed state. I struggled to make sense of what I saw and felt. These drawings often drew laughter from my mother and father but, in spite of their gentle mockery, I sensed that somewhere buried ion this activity of drawing there lay a wondrous elemental power.

When I look and see an ink drawing of Tobias by Rembrandt, a stubbed pencil remark of Martha lying in the bath by Pierre Bonnard or, say, a cigarette smoking hand by Philip Guston, then clearly, beyond ideas, it is the vision, the coming closer, that really matters.

Today this mysterious quality remains as primal and as tantalising as it did then. My own conceit, the facade and crude consciousness of ideas cannot undo the profound igniting and unconscious power of drawing.





Monday, 13 September 2021

Relationscapes/Material Flows : infra Body, Personal Relations and Spatial Agency

Slow Philosophy
Reading against the institution

Troubleyn Laboratorium
Jan Fabre

Every colour has its own perspective.
Jenny Saville

Material flows and currents of sensory awareness in which images and objects reciprocally take shape.
Tim Ingold

The Dynamic Real
Vibrant Matter
Jane Bennett

infra
Max Richter
Wayne McGregor
Julian Opie

Vitality
Difference
New Materialisms
Elizabeth Grosz

Diffraction attends to specific material entanglements, a discursive phenomenon that makes the effects of different differences evident.
Performativity, subject and image do not pre-exist as such, but merge through intra-actions. 
Karen Barad

Collage, Superimposition, Bounded and Un-Bounded 



















Space and Place
THE PERSPECTIVE OF EXPERIENCE
Yi-Fu Tuan

1959 : Patti Smith
Peace and Noise

Lingering at the threshold between word and image
Cy Twombly
Claire Daigle

https://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/lingering-threshold-between-word-and-image

Although his work resonates strongly with generations of younger artists, ranging from Brice Marden to Richard Prince to Tacita Dean to Patti Smith, it has a general propensity to polarise its audience between perplexity and unbridled admiration.

Certainly, the fortuities of a name are being pushed too far here, but what does Twombly do but offer up words in all of their resonance: literal, metaphoric, corporeal, material? His citations often have the vanitas effect of graffiti: ‘Cy was here’. Lingering at the threshold between word and image, Twombly renders visible those things – experience, emotion, the body’s share – that lie beyond the reach of verbal articulation.

Existential Gestures : Looking away from the sea

Albert Camus : The Plague, 1947. (Penguin Fiction)

The townspeople of Oran are in the grip of a virulent plague.

Cut off from the rest of the world, living in fear, they each respond in their own way to the grim challenge of the deadly bacillus. Among them is Dr Rieux, a humanitarian and healer, and it is through his eyes that that we witness the devastating course of the epidemic.

Written in 1947, just after the Nazi occupation of France, Camus's magnificent novel is also a story of courage and determination against the arbitrariness and seeming absurdity of human existence.

'Camus represents a particularly modern type of temperament, a mystic soul in a Godless universe, thirsty for the absolute, forever rebellious against the essential injustice of the human condition'
Shusha Guppy, Sunday Times