I’ve got hundreds and hundreds of those, trying to get an effect of flesh – burnt flesh or when you slide one colour into another – they become like a word-coupling or a musician putting sounds together – it all eventually feeds in.
I used to go to the Hunterian Museum in London, part of the Royal College of Surgeons. I was a member of the Pathology Society there and they used to have a room for surgeons to practise new types of operations; so there was always a room which had corpses and I used to go in and wander around; and what I loved was that each head was wrapped in a plastic bag, a Sainsbury’s bag or a Tesco bag – obviously it depended upon what part of the body the surgeons were working on – the last time I was there they were working on something to do with the spine, but all the heads, bagged up. There was something so everyday about having a Sainsbury’s bag over your head at the end of your life.’
Jenny leads me to a table of paint tubs, each different, numbered and labelled.
‘I’ve mixed these for a new piece. Because I work on such a large scale and on quite a few things at the same time, I make a series of tones and spend days studying one colour and mixing a large amount of that, shifting it so that I’ve got a core tone that can be moved around.’
Have you got huge vats of paint somewhere?
‘Big tubs of white, yes, and I use kitchen knives, big old-fashioned things to mix with. I think the maximum I’ve ever made in a day is six or seven tones. That (points to paint on a glass-topped table) will be, for example, a side cheek and a panel of the neck, so I’ll mix up two tones to go near each other – one to move your eye right back and the other to pull you forward. It started as a way of painting more abstractly, but now I’ve got certain tones that I know are going to do a job in the painting. Once I’ve got those, they’ll shift and move around. The process came out of trying to keep something fluid in a larger scale.’
Do you see these paint tones as ‘movers’ rather than colours, then? You see them in the context of the actions they’ll perform, pushing and pulling the eye – a sculptural, kinetic thing?
‘I started doing it because I thought about it as a sort of human paste; making big pots of liquid flesh. It’s like composing – painting is like playing music, I think; so certain notes I’ve already keyed and I know that, if I shift it, say, “Plus cerulean blue to the left, plus cadmium red deep to the right,” I know that that’s going to move the tone in a certain way and I write that on the edge on the pot and I’ll keep it and I’ll get maybe six or seven pots and then I’ll do a session and I can be much freer with the actual painting because I know they’ll do the job.
If I want real space behind an ear, for example, I’ll work out exactly “more cold red, more ultramarine” so that tone behind the ear will literally shoot back and do what I need it to do.’
You’ve always drawn and painted bodies?
‘Always. I’ve always done that – anybody who would sit for me. My best friend at school was interested in French literature and she would come and read and I would do paintings and drawings and sculptures of her. Instead of revising at home, she would revise on my bed while I was doing drawings; the human figure has always been something I’ve been immediately drawn to.’
Were you always drawn to the viscosity and physicality of these materials too – the oils up here and the charcoal downstairs?
‘Yes. I don’t mix my mediums much. I use linseed oil and genuine turps in the paint and that’s it. I know the strength of the paint I want and language just develops and develops. I look at other artists – I look at a lot more abstract painting than figurative – I look at very old figurative painting by the Old Masters and I look at abstract work from the last century. Abstract Expressionism; de Kooning’s are probably the paintings I look at most because they feel so incredibly modern, but he had to be abstract to get to what he wanted to get to and I don’t want to be completely abstract. When he tries to paint figures later on they become quite hilarious and monstrous and cartoon-like and I don’t want to go to that level. I want to find a way, a space to keep – not a tight realism but something very precise and serious about the body. I want to do that but also keep the abstract qualities of paint so that I’ve got those two things constantly rubbing next to each other.’
• • • • •
The first piece of Jenny Saville’s work I encountered was Strategy (South Face/Front Face/North Face) that was used as the cover of Manic Street Preachers’ 1994 album The Holy Bible. I remember listening to it in the art rooms at school – scrutinising the cover triptych, liner notes and lyrics – a symbiotic body.
Jenny collaborated with the band again recently, the painting Stare fronting Journal for Plague Lovers, an album written around lyrics left behind by disappeared member Richey Edwards.*
‘The first time I did the Manics thing, I was living in Glasgow. I’d just done the show at the Saatchi Gallery and Richey Edwards called me up and we had a conversation about anorexia and I wasn’t initially keen on doing an album cover but then, after talking to him, I really wanted to do it because we had a lot of interests that were similar – about technology and the body, writers we liked – and he faxed me the lyrics to “4st 7lb” and I read that and said, “I’ll do it. Use the triptych, you can have it.”
I didn’t realise it was going to become this incredibly cult album. People still ask me to sign that album cover when I give talks about my work; there’s always someone, in America or wherever, who brings The Holy Bible album along.’
Later that year, I ask Nicky Wire of the Manics about working with Jenny:
‘She’s been so good to us, really. Amazing. I was really intimidated to meet her when she came to see us play Journal at the Roundhouse. You know, intimidated in a nice way but … I was so impressed with her and actually more intrigued and indebted afterwards.
I feel a correlation with her in the sense that, for me, she’s by far the greatest modern British artist but sometimes she’s not seen that way because she’s never been associated with Tracey Emin or Damien Hirst, even though they sprang up at the same time; she’s out on her own. There’s something inside her that’s like “Oh, fuck the rest of you.”’
I was in the Roundhouse for that Journal for Plague Lovers gig and recall Nicky dedicating a song to Jenny, who was in the crowd, with the words ‘She’s taken a lot of shit for this cover and I don’t know why’ – a nod to the hysterical reaction of several supermarkets to the Stare sleeve; removing it from shelves, covering it up or refusing to stock it altogether.
‘I didn’t know it was going to get the publicity that it got,’ she says when I ask her about it. ‘I was shocked by the supermarket scandal because it’s quite a straight painting really. I thought it was interesting the way people reacted – “There’s blood on the face!” Sorry, you’re made of eight pints of it, what’s so damaging about that?
In Italy the relationship with death is much closer. We’ve sanitised all those things. We don’t wash our parents’ bodies before burial here whereas in the south of Italy they still do that. I feel that’s the way the culture’s moved really, we haven’t learnt to deal with death. We’re all so paranoid about prolonging our lives for as long as possible … I think we’re going to have a lot of tubular humans.’
• • • • •
Standing among these paintings, it strikes me that Jenny’s work, like J.G. Ballard’s, is ultimately concerned with the interzone between life and death. The work on the walls crackles with this enquiry, the energy worked into them, bunched and potential beneath the viscous skin.
Close up, the paint is meted, cut and spread – the movements caught and frozen; plains of colour conjoining and colliding.
I point to the red swipe of an inside ear.
These moments of