Jenny Saville

and Douglas Stuart

Douglas StuartYou’re about to open your show at the National Portrait Gallery, of fifty works spanning thirty-five years. How does that feel?

Jenny SavilleI’m looking forward to seeing the whole group of my work over the years. It’s useful for future work, because I can see: That worked, that didn’t work as well, that still holds up. It helps me adjust a little bit.

DSI also imagine that since you work at such a scale, it must be quite hard to get to see so many of them all together at the same time.

JSWhen I see a photograph of myself in front of the paintings, they look huge relative to my scale. The challenge of a large-scale work is exciting because to achieve the level of realism at that scale, to build out that kind of realism, is a journey.

DSAnd looking back now, what do you think your twenty-two-year-old self would think about this show coming up at the NPG?

JSWell, it’s exciting.

DSWould it have shaken her?

JSMy twenties were an incredible time. Before that, I had waitressing jobs alongside being at art school, so I’d have to leave the school’s studios and go to waitress. But during the summer between my third and fourth year, I worked to put enough money in the bank so that I wouldn’t have to waitress. And I learned a lesson about time, that it was the most precious aspect of life. It was wonderful to be able to paint every day—everything came together in my fourth year, and my degree show had my first mature pictures. A lot of art coming out of Glasgow felt exciting, and there was a strong figurative craft.

DSIt’s quite a technical, traditional school, isn’t it, the Glasgow School of Art [GSA]?

JSYes, it was departmentally structured—a painting department and a photography department.

DSDid you always know that you wanted to work in paint?

JSI always painted or made things from a young age. I have always felt very present when making or painting something. The permission for creativity was strong in my upbringing. My parents were teachers and would encourage creativity, that I had the right to create.

DSIn a lot of ways, it’s you and your work that gave me my right to create; you were the one who gave me my first creative awakening. Growing up in Glasgow, I’d never been to a museum or a gallery. After my mother died, when I was sixteen, a couple of art teachers at school, Mrs. Mcleod and Mrs. Chesney, could see I was struggling. One night after school, they said, “Look, just come with us,” and they took me up to the Glasgow School of Art. They took me through the 1992 degree show and a lot of it was sort of lost on me, because I was only a kid. But then I turned the corner and there was Propped, and although I didn’t understand all the layers of it, I was blown away. Art had pierced me. Really, in that one moment, your work changed the course of my entire life.

JSWas that the first time you went to the building?

DSFirst time. I grew up less than a mile away from it and hardly knew it existed. Even if I had, I would have been intimidated; working-class kids don’t always feel that they’re invited into those circles. But the art school is the shining jewel of Glasgow, and [Charles Rennie] Mackintosh is so important to a Glaswegian’s sense of identity. That building is a global icon.

JSThe atmosphere of the building was one of the reasons I wanted to go there. You walk up the Mackintosh steps, go through those double doors, and feel it’s a place to make art. The painting department was in the purpose-built Mackintosh building.

When I first got to Glasgow, I was ignorant to the nuances of the language, but as I learned to tune my ear, the humor’s great and I enjoyed living there.

DSGlasgow patter is confrontational, and it takes time to pick up the rhythm, but it’s warm and inviting and it connects us. Those works in your degree show were perceived as quite confrontational at the time as well, but for me, just the fact that those images existed, I found them incredibly generous. They invite you to be a bit vulnerable, they don’t hold themselves back from you.

JSThere’s a strength in vulnerability. If you’re prepared to be brave, it’s empowering to offer that vulnerability.

DSIt took me some time to feel brave enough to do that with my writing. But yes, that’s how you connect. I think about those bridal shoes in Propped a lot. They’re the things that always hold my attention, that sort of small, knowing, almost novelistic detail.

JSI bought those from a charity shop.

DSThey kill me because they’re signaling a kind of pride and vanity. It adds great tension to the work.

JSIt heightens the nakedness. It’s a narrative aspect of the painting.

DSThey’re just the perfect detail. But when I was writing Shuggie Bain [2020], I looked at Trace [1993] a lot. It was an image that I had of Shuggie when he takes off his mother’s bra to care for her because she can’t care for herself and he’s looking at her back, and looking at the lines left in the flesh and rubbing them and hoping they would lift, like if he could erase them, he could take away some of her pain. There’s a truth in that sort of intimacy.

JSHilary Robinson, who was my theory tutor for my dissertation, had written an essay where she said, “A body is not a neutral ground of meaning but a copper plate to be etched.” And thinking about that just connected these tight constricted bra marks, these indentations of an intimate space.

DSThose paintings were helpful in slowing me down. They ask us to observe closely and make sure to pay attention to both the beauty and the blemishes in a body. They challenged me to write about bodies in a similar way, and it’s essential because the body is a very political thing. It’s often the only thing that my characters have—their bodies are shaped by what they do, and their lives are shaped by how they use their bodies to survive. Their bodies are the only thing of real value that they own.

JSIt’s what you can affect, and there’s a lot of attention concentrated on our bodies. You see that shift in the high street, the way the shops change over the years: you used to have a post office, a stationer, a butcher; now many have transitioned to nail bars, tanning salons, tattoo parlors.

DSI was just at a university a couple of weeks ago to do a reading of Shuggie. It’s only five years old but I can’t yet look back on him with fondness. So I had an hour-long reading before the audience and all I wanted to do was rewrite the book. I just wished I had a red pen.

JSYou would change words or sentence structures?

DSOften, I would try to say it with fewer words. Like just one more edit, please! Do you look back with kindness? With fondness?

JSFondness sometimes, or I find my fearless naivete a bit amusing. Often I hear the music that was playing at the time, look at passages of paint and remember making that mark, the size of brush I used, the feeling inside. Sometimes I wonder what this drive is I’ve got, to get up a ladder for hours making paintings of figures or portraits. When I see my paintings I often think, “Oh, that part worked, but maybe I should have put another bridging tone there.” People say, “Oh, that’s a great painting,” and you think, “It’s not as good as it was in my head” [laughter].

DSIt’s similar with writing: your audience encounters the finished artifact and they don’t see the journey and the loneliness.

JSI wouldn’t call it loneliness. I enjoy making paintings.

DSI find writing very lonely because I worked for twenty years in fashion.

JSSo that’s very social.

DSAnd very kinetic. There was a lot of energy and movement.

JSIt’s fast too, isn’t it?

DSIt’s very fast. Fashion was my job but writing was my art. I worked twelve hours a day, six days a week, all the way up until I was short-listed for the Booker. I’d spent years becoming a fashion designer and I had that real Presbyterian Scottish guilt that said, “You’ve built this, you cannot throw it out.”

JSKnowing deep inside you were a writer.

DSI’d always wanted to be a writer. Now, writing in contrast to fashion feels incredibly lonely because I sit around and talk to imaginary people all day.

JSDo you have a routine?

DSI find imaginary people are chattiest in the mornings, so I try to get up at six and I work till two or three. How about you?

JSI’ve had different working rhythms and routines in my life. Recently I’ve been getting up around six thirty in the morning and then I’ll paint until I feel that lull, which tends to be around four, and then I might do another session. I like painting eyes first thing in the morning.

DSWhy is that?

JSBecause my concentration’s at its highest, so I tend to paint details like teeth and eyes first thing in the morning, when I’m sharp. And then there are times when I like to do more adventurous paint work—I’ve learned how to be in tune with the time and pace of the day. The more I’ve painted and made radical changes or color choices, the more confidence it brings getting everything in balance. Sometimes when I have a few interesting passages but want to live with that for a while, I put the painting aside and work on something else to stay fresh. I look at the previous painting and find solutions for it.

DSI’ve found something similar in writing because I rarely write a book in a linear fashion, or chronologically. I don’t start at the start and go to the end because I feel like inspiration comes and goes and I’m always fearful of losing it. If I feel a scene or a character or a moment, then that’s where I go. There’s nothing worse for me than sitting at a blank page and trying to bring it forth, so I go to the page where the work wants to come.

JSYou just put the train on the tracks, because once you lay something down in paint, you have somewhere to travel, a presence to build on. It’s a game of flexible thinking and staying in the present. It’s satisfying to run paint together that gives a sense of space and depth. I like paintings with balance and a strong armature.

DSOne of the things that speaks to me the most about your work is your journey with color. It has evolved so much. In the early work I can actually feel Glasgow in the paintings. In the work from the GSA I can sense the sky.

JSThat silvery sky. Glasgow can have beautiful light. My first home there was on Hill Street, and you’d look over toward the flats and mountains and see this silvery light. I’ve never seen it anywhere else quite the same way, and that light of Glasgow is very much in those paintings, that silvery gray background and the greens in shadows. Over the last few years I’ve thought much more about nature and light. At GSA you learn naturalistic skin tones, but then I’d travel, look at other approaches to painting. I went to Paris and New York and saw how [Willem] de Kooning painted flesh and thought, “What great, fleshy colors and fluidity.” I started to collect images that had a lot more color in them—images of paintings, fashion compositions, all types of imagery, medical images, surgical imagery. Then after September the 11th and the Iraq War, we were flooded with images that had a lot of intense color and emotion and I responded to the atmosphere of that time.

So I started to think about the differences between nature, reality, and the photographic process in relationship to painting. Artists like Gerhard Richter used to talk about those techniques, a lot of painters were engaged in that. My work evolved and I started using ranges of red and blue pigments, for example, like in my Stare heads [2004–14]. I wanted the realism of a body or a head and evolved to using stronger color. If you’re curious you experiment, and on that journey you discover possibilities.

At the beginning of making a new body of work, the first one or two paintings can be quite conceptual. Once I’ve got a good rhythm going, the paintings are less conceptual and I enjoy making those paintings more. I tend to move the paint around better, with more fluidity.

DSThe same in writing. You’ve got to write through it, in a way, to sort of free yourself of it, and then get to the thing that you’ve got no idea that you were heading toward. You’re feeling a character and you’re not quite sure what they’re going to do, so you build this world for them and then you see how they react.

JSIt’s been said before, but it’s probably impossible to make the perfect work. I often think, “That’s almost what I meant, that’s got something.” And this moves you forward to the next painting.

DSTruth is essential in writing. And there’s power in writing truths that people would rather leave unsaid—maybe like depicting a body that some might rather not see? When you’re painting do you think about the truth a lot? Do you think about truth and beauty, or is it a different. . .

JSAll good art has truth, even a mysterious truth that works somehow beyond knowledge. You can feel it.

DSWhen people take my books to bed and they open the novel and find it’s a bit tough or challenging, or even ugly, it’s like, “Why did you bring this into bed with me? Why are you telling me this?” I think readers can feel violated by literature because it can force the truth upon them when they feel they are otherwise safe, protected.

JSTruth, beauty, light, mystery, they’re all important. It’s almost impossible to describe why something works in painting. It is what it is and you either feel it or you don’t.

DSI think you’re right when you say it starts with the light. Glasgow can have that sort of very clear light that illuminates it all, and it’s reflected in the spirit of the place, because people are very frank and clear-eyed about it. They see the truth. I was worried about the reception the novel would get at home, but what I’d underestimated was the ability of Glaswegians to look at themselves in that clear unfiltered light. In my adopted country of America, things are different, especially at the moment: it’s all illusion and artificiality. If I’ve done my research right, it was when you got to America that you really began to perceive different types of bodies? Is that right?

JSIt was the first time I’d been in an environment where there were multiple big bodies, and I found that shocking—the consumption of food, the portion sizes, et cetera. At that time I was interested in the narrative journey that a bigger body had, because no body starts out that big, so there’s a journey to get to those sizes. I’ve painted all types and sizes of bodies and everyone’s body is interesting. When people model for me, even if they’re slightly apprehensive if they haven’t modeled before, they often say it made them feel empowered and when they see the finished work, they often say to me, “I’m so glad I did that.” I’m grateful to those who’ve modeled. In the process of modeling, the conversations are interesting, a lot comes out about their life’s journey, and there’s such connection in people’s humanity. And I’ll hold those conversations in my memory while I’m making the work.

DSAnd do you try to capture the spirit of it?

JSThere’s a combination of them—who they are—and the techniques involved to portray them in paint.

DSYou capture the soul in that way.

JSThat’s up to whoever’s looking at the paintings.

DSI must admit, I was horrified looking back at the journalism around some of your earlier work, and the fact that reviewers would use the word “grotesque” to describe it. Obviously those works haven’t changed, but the world around us keeps shifting and changing, so hopefully reactions to those works have changed as well. Has that journey been interesting to you, or do you not pay attention to it?

JSI just get on with my work. You can’t predict how work will be perceived. And you evolve as well, you know. I was navigating my way in painting but in the early ’90s there were fewer spaces to show, and only a small minority of artists got major platforms. Now art is exhibited from all over the world and different voices are being heard. I was given the chance to exhibit in such beautiful spaces, like the Saatchi Collection and then at Gagosian in New York, and I put everything into those works. And then once you’ve been accepted, it’s like, you’ve won the Booker Prize, you can’t stay annoyed about that [laughter].

DSAre you sad you can’t be an outsider anymore?

JSYou have a platform now. And it’s the bravery of your truth that gave you that.

DSI felt really overwhelmed by the feeling of being on the outside and nobody knowing me. And then suddenly everybody looked at me like, “Where the hell did you just come from?” There was fifteen years of work behind my novels so I hadn’t just arrived, I’d just been quietly over there where no one was paying attention to me. I miss that.

JSIt’s important to have time to develop, be playful, use your imagination. I’m often judged on those early degree-show works and I’ve developed my painting a lot since then. You have to make the work the way it should be. You can’t make work to appease people who have written a bad review. And if you’re mature about it, the bad review of a new body of work is okay: “Yeah, that is an aspect that I’ve got a problem with.” If you can be mature enough to accept that!

DSThat’s very big of you. I’m not sure I’m quite there yet [laughs]. That’s why the world is so nostalgic for the ’90s, a time before the Internet, for that sense of being by ourselves inside our own lives, without constant commentary and feedback. That’s probably why the GSA and your time there and my overlapping time holds a fascination for me, because it seems like an idyllic time to make work when you could be in your own experience and also feel like you weren’t so exposed to the world every single day.

JSYou can’t have that first journey again.

DSI’m fascinated by what Cy Twombly told you once about working—about trying to be ignored for as long as you can in your career, which is so smart.

JSBy the time he’d told me that, everybody wanted to know Cy, to show his work and talk to him. And your impulse is to look at that with admiration, but I could see there was a kind of suffering in his words, because you need to concentrate, you need time to play, and that’s probably why he worked in isolated places, so he could focus. You can’t have judgment when you play. You want to be like that child sitting on the floor making a painting when nobody cares—that’s the most precious thing because it’s a space without judgment, and you need to feel that.

DSYou’ve got to retreat from the world. But was your early success overwhelming at twenty-two, or did it just feel like permission?

JSMany opportunities happened in a short space of time. I was fortunate to sell my degree show, which was the first time I had enough money to work for a prolonged period; I won the Newbery Medal and Charles Saatchi commissioned a body of work to show at his Boundary Road gallery. So I had this run of wonderful things happen. And as I moved forward I just said to myself, “Get this work right, make this work the best you can.” So I stayed quiet and concentrated. And that’s the lesson I learned—that the prize is the journey. Working and enjoying life’s opportunities with family and friends is the prize.