I might have discovered a process?

Last week I started to play a wonderful CD given to me by my friend Jo. A compilation of interesting, rhythmic Parisian, African, South American, ambient sounds. So good infact, that every single track is even better than the one before ... which is totally fantastic! Winni and I had a great time dancing around the bedroom with plenty of facial gestures to accompany our moves. I also discovered that I can in fact lie down on the sofa and Winni will very happily carry on dancing or start drawing and that I can perhaps also just relax and supervise from a reclining position. This is tempting (of course?!).

At one point while I lay there watching her dance, marvelling at her rhythm and freedom of movement and the beautiful shapes she made in the space around her – I wondered about how I might capture that image and the feeling. I also chastised myself for not just being present and tried harder to 'be in the moment'! Then, I just couldn't help myself and... I got my mobile phone out and tried to take some pictures. But, my phone is on its last legs (there is a delay of about 3 seconds on the camera), and Winni is not particularly up for being photographed – why should she be! So I ended up with 8 completely blurred shots of her dancing.

The next day, at sleep time, which is when I sometimes get my hour or two to do something – I was sitting looking at a blank piece of fabriano paper. I had taped it up on my old drawing board which we recently moved from the bedroom where it has been ignored for some time to the sitting room where it will no doubt still get ignored but maybe not completely. I was thinking how nice it would be to start a painting or drawing if only I could think of something to work from. And then I remembered that I myself have said it's ok to work from photos on more than one occasion – “so”... I thought, “why not work from photos? – anything. As long as it gets you started!”

I jumped up from my seat, trying not to think about it too much in case the thinking stopped the doing - got out my charcoals and with the phone in my left hand and a drawing implement in my right I started moving my right hand across the page – I flicked through the photos of Winni dancing and kept moving from one to another resting on each for a moment and making a mark in response to it on the paper. And then starting again. At some point I got paint out and did the same thing, working quickly across seven figures. Winni had on a wonderful stripy, long dress (sent by her great Aunty Tricia) and I used the colour in the dress to focus on making the shapes of her dancing. All blurred images but enough to get the sense of a figure and of movement.

High points were... really feeling her dancing and being transported back to the moment of watching her. Trying to capture the line of her neck and thinking how well I know that delicate neck; how it looks, feels, smells. I know that little leg and arm etc. etc. It was amazing to feel so engaged and alive with the subject and the process of making marks. Low points were really feeling the rustiness in my looking and my ability to make my implements do what I want them to do, to make the line curve in such a way as to suggest a tummy to make the shadow in the fabric suggest a swish of the skirt. etc. etc. But that's all OK and to be expected.

Later that same evening I was sitting with Mike and Bill, they were playing chess and I was looking at my work on the drawing board. I had an intense little private moment about the whole process I had been through and... it was good. I wondered if this is what artists experience when they feel a compulsion to paint or draw. I can see I am trying to express so much in that little piece in front of me.

I have since reflected that if this was my main way of finding a voice and working out my thoughts and feelings I too would 'need' it – but that actually I tend to do most of my working out verbally via conversation. So, I am processing all the time in my head and with others. It could be that the process of painting and drawing gives me space to take my personal reflections more deeply and that it will be more satisfying doing it alone rather than with others – I don't know. The point is that I understand I am driven to communicate and I do it all the time – but its mainly verbal or written. The visual is less likely to get a look in. I guess I tend to revert to what I feel comfortable with – stay safe.

Drawing and painting the images of a child dancing has given me a renewed sense that I am infact a real beginner. I am learning a new language and I just experienced a moment of actually dreaming in French as it were. And... it felt good.

As I sat at the dining table and started to share my thoughts with my company who were deep into their chess game and therefore not that willing to go there – I was gagging for the opportunity to talk it all through with someone and to pull apart the little journey I had just been on – I wanted to talk to another artist and find out about their experience. I needed the refuge of an analytical conversation - because this is where I am comfortable and this is where I can trust my understanding.

It was a very good thing to be left with these thoughts and feelings and to just keep looking at my little painting. I feel naive but this is all true for me where I am at right now.

We went into the bedroom tonight and Winni pointed at the music and said “put on mummy” and I pressed play and she smiled and we started dancing!

Any thoughts anyone? Why do you make art?...or perhaps more importantly if you aren't making any at the moment - What's stopping you? Is it important to find a process? Something to refer to when it's hard to get going?

experience reality, take photos, capture, draw and paint from photos, look, work out, recreate, reflect...?

A spontaneous encounter with Dracula

I have been fighting with my daughter for nearly two hours – trying to cajole her into going for a sleep. She normally goes for one at 12ish, but lately it creeps further and further through the day leaving me no choice but to wait patiently for her to succumb to the tiredness she must surely feel given that she is on the go from 6.a.m.

I cannot even begin to put into words the desperation for a moments peace – for a small chunk of time to sit and be quiet. To do something or nothing. To recoup. Having the promise of it dangled before my drooping eyes by a 2 year old saying 'not bed mummy', after two separate occasions of lying her down in bed with two stories (one won't do) and warm milk – and my whole psyche aching for the moment when I say, “have a nice sleep, see you in a little while” and she says “bye mummy”. And yet it does not come – 2 false starts – Agony.

Anyway, she is asleep now. Thank the heavens. I am supposed to be on a detox of 2 oranges, 2 bananas and the juice of one lemon blended into a drink 3 times a day for 3 days. It's no big deal and I have done it before – but I am sitting down now with a coffee – and although not strictly allowed I figure one can only aid with the detox – 2 on the other hand... now that would be toxic of course!

So, on to more interesting pastures. I wanted to write about my Saturday at the Phoenix and the Count Dracula animation workshop for art therapists and arts in health workers. It was run by Tony Gammidge an artist, art therapist and film maker with a number of years experience of leading CPD workshops. We worked with the story of Count Dracula using a variety of art making techniques including video and animation, sound, puppets, shadows, light projections, drawing and installation. The emphasis of the workshop was on experimentation with a variety of art making processes, collaboration and reflection on both what wisdom the story might hold for us in our personal and professional lives and also offer a glimpse of a different way of working in a clinical setting.

A very interesting day – and a challenge both creatively and personally. I nearly sabotaged the whole thing for myself – first by staying up really late (1.30a.m. – that is really late for me! Cos I know I'll be up by 6a.m. With a couple of interruptions at 2 and 4a.m.) and by drinking lots of red wine – which although accompanied by pots of weak early grey tea and glasses of water still left me worse for wear and sitting on the edge of my bed, head spinning – thinking about being an artist and about the painting I had been working on that day of Winni dancing.

So, I was a little delicate as I jumped on my bike with 10 minutes to get there. I had my coffee in a flask and wrapped my bagel in tin foil and stuffed them into my rucksack. As soon as I was on the bike and charging along at top speed I felt free and engaged. I locked my bike up on the railings outside, entered the Phoenix building and as I climbed up the two flights of stairs to the studio - I felt a little wave of butterflies as I reflected on the fact that these were the early days of me starting to re-engage and reinstate myself in the adult world without a small child attached to my ankles. And it felt so exciting - like I have a whole chance again to reconnect with people and with my life and what I am about.

I didn't know anything about the story of Count Dracula when I sat down in a circle with the other 6 participants - all women. We introduced ourselves and shared a bit about why we were there in the traditional workshop opening stylee. In the blurb he sent out before the workshop Tony had said we did not need to know the story in any great detail. He did add that we might want to think about what it is that draws us to the story; an image, a particular scene, a sound etc. but that it is OK to be spontaneous about this on the day....no pressure. As a result, I deliberately decided not to find out any thing about the story – because I did not want to pre-empt myself and I was also curious to see what spontaneity might feel and look like.

We talked as a group about the story – people chipped in with bits they knew. I got my note book out and started to scribble and think. A pleasure. My mind went to blood letting, and associated ideas like rejuvenation and release. I thought about Count Dracula imbibing another's blood and the control that might afford him over their spirit, and how when you are in love you can feel a vast pain and vulnerability (as well as joy) from closeness to another. That feeling of connectedness that comes with loving and the fear of separation from or loss of it. I saw the isolation of the castle and thought about motherhood and how difficult it is to come back from. About being unreachable, and inaccessible - at times even to oneself. I wondered about the importance of stories and how we all have one to tell and how our own interact and weave with those of other people and about authorship and truth.

We spent half an hour making an individual response to these discussions – and I found myself making (suprise suprise – I really am starting to take ownership!) a tiny baby figure cut out of white card, a larger pregnant female standing figure with streaming hair, and a lying down female possibly dying (or giving birth) with a mouth open to suggest screaming. I didn't know what I was going to do with them – but I was thinking about motherhood; death and rejuvenation in terms of identity and about being an artist and how to keep it all going.

I worked with two other women to make a stop frame animation. We just got stuck right in and collaborated each bringing the things we had made and with an overhead projector and whatever props we could find we made a sinister little piece using the paper baby placed in a plastic back which looked particularly womb like with a piece of red acetate held over the camera lense and these Dracula type claws coming into the space trying to pluck the baby from the bag and the mother fighting the claw to save the baby – in vain. At the end of the day we showed our little films to each other and what was quite remarkable for me – was to learn from Tony that in the Count Dracula story – there is a scene in which count Dracula returns to the castle to find a trio of female vampires who appear from nowhere, trying to seduce Jonathan Harker - the increasingly reluctant guest in the Count’s Transylvanian castle. Dracula screams angrily at them and drops a bag on the floor containing a live baby for the women which they then kill.

How weird is that? Having not known the story at all – I work with two other women and we end up making a piece that reflects a particularly disturbing image in the story. It was not lost on any of us either just how powerful the images were that we conjured in our little film. It was striking how the Dracula story emerged through my own, through the animation and you could as Tony suggested read it in many ways...i.e my child sucking my 'creative blood' (not a nice image). As he says, "hopefully the workshop gave you a much needed transfusion!". And... I'd say it did.

I want to find more out about the story of Count Dracula and in particular the references within it to mental health. It would be interesting to look at what was happening in the field of mental health around 1897, when it was written. Has anyone read it? Do any of you know anything about this narcissistic Count with the soul of the hunter?

To see the films have a look on Youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMq1P-L8XXI

For more info about workshops:

http://movingtalesworkshops.blogspot.com/
http://tonygammidge.typepad.co.uk/

Enemies of Good Art

"There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall". This was written by Cyril Connolly, in Enemies of Promise, 1938. Connolly was a writer trying to understand the reasons for his own failure to produce a major work of literature despite being recognised at the time as a leading man of letters and a great critic.

What affects your ability to make work and to make 'great' work – that you value and that is recognised by yourself (and others?) as having something to contribute? Does this even matter to you?

Does being a mother relegate your work?

I went to an excellent free event at Fabrica Art Gallery a couple of weeks ago. It was a creative drawing extravaganza organised by a local artist Jane Fordham called Smudging and Scratching and Dancing in Coils, combining a contemporary dancer and four cine projectors loaded with found film from the 20s to the 60s.

I had been up in London the night before hanging out with my brother Fin and my dad. The reason for going up was a meeting at the Whitechapel Art Gallery called Enemies of Good Art. It turned out to be a very interesting gathering of over 40 mothers, most with babies or small children. We came together to explore our shared experiences of being artists as well as parents and how to manage the demands of both and enable ourselves to continue making creative work. We talked about the negative feelings towards the presence of children in the art world; in terms of their physical presence at art related events or in gallery spaces and as subject matter in the work of female artists.

I am particularly interested in these negative ideas towards children and mother artists as earlier on in my motherhood I realised somewhere along the line I had somehow managed to imbibe them quite successfully. Filled perhaps with my own internalised negative constructions of motherhood as being somehow less than, low status, undervalued by society etc. etc. (we know all this)... I was not about to embrace it as central to my art practice, either in process or as subject matter. So, I struggled to maintain a very rational and pragmatic approach to exploring my visual language and to focus on anything other than my pregnancy or soon after my brand new little Winifred sleeping by my side or staring up at me as I painted strong images of line and physical domestic space. I didn't want to fall into a stereotype, I didn't want to fulfill other people's negative ideas – but in my efforts to avoid all this – I was missing the point. And that is... about embracing the challenge, and being brave enough to be all of who I am and say what I want to say and decide how I want to say it - with the art that I make. And...to stop self censoring and second guessing how it might be received.

I find that sooo difficult. It is hard to be free...sometimes I associate freedom with naivete, and I don't think any of us can afford to be naïve. I studied Social Anthropology and it gave me a real education in culture and men and women. I remember so much poignant stuff about male and female relations in cultures across the world. One anthropologist, Sherry Ortner pointed out that, cross-culturally, woman is "identified with, or symbolically associated with, nature, as opposed to man, who is identified with culture". Ortner, argued that women are more closely identified with nature because of their bodies, specifically their sexual and reproductive bodies. This association explains why women's closeness to nature seems inevitably to become a mark of second-class citizenship, for while women create "only perishables--human beings," men create "relatively lasting, eternal, transcendent objects". This was what she found from looking at the place of women in society.

I will say more about this another time – because I have a lot to say about it and I find it fascinating in so many ways. But for the purposes of now, my received wisdom while studying anthropology was that across the world (past and present), there are examples, so, so many – of how women are relegated in one way or another in culture and society. I spent my late teens and early 20's therefore developing the idea that I was not going to let myself be associated with things that were being denigrated i.e. being a women (or a mother). Enough said. My ongoing challenge is to find ways of integrating all that is me – all of my selves regardless of society and other people's judgements. And, I am just about starting to do that in my work quite effectively! I think.

Back to the mothers meeting at the Whitechapel then (woops!). I was really interested in discussions about how to get studio space and how to develop both a national and local network of artists with children. I also like the idea that if we are going to make work – we should/ could do so with children in tow in public spaces, rather than hiding ourselves away and pretending that our children and our mothering identity are not crucial and relevant to who we are and what our work is about.

The drawing class back in Brighton, followed directly from the Whitechapel gathering and needless to say it felt great rocking up to Fabrica direct from London, with empty sketchbooks in hand and a bag full of drawing equipment. I sat on the floor in the darkness (among loads of other people of all ages and backgrounds) making marks fast, freely and joyfully. Turning over the pages quickly, putting down black onto white sheets, responding to the dancing body clothed all in white and the flickering projections of a 20's wedding, children on beaches and an elderly man and women standing uncomfortably looking into the lens, searching for the comfort in each others hands.

For more information about the Enemies of Good Art meeting contact:
martinamullaney@googlemail.com
I just found this interesting website have a look at www.whodoesshethinksheis.net/

Do I want to be in therapy (for 3 years)?

I got my place at Goldsmiths. This September, I start a part time MA in Art Psychotherapy. Or do I?

I think I just have to go for it and worry about the reality later. But, its going to be full on. Two days a week for three years, getting on the train at 7a.m. - up to East Croydon, change for New Cross. That's £34 on train fares before 9.30a.m. twice a week. Then I have to be in therapy for the next three years. That's another £40 a week – at least. Do I want to be in therapy? for that long? That's an awful lot of talking. No not really. And anyway, I've already 'done it' twice.

The first time was when I was about 21 and loosing my mind with all the anthropology I was learning. It totally blew my vague grasp on reality. Learning that everything is a social construction can take its toll. Living everything as if it is a social construction, there in lies...loosing it. And I did. To be fair, I was also probably out of my depth with some of the people I was hanging out with. I never put two and two together when they were off travelling round Europe in their VW camper vans, or hanging out on Anjuna beach for the whole of the summer holidays. I thought we were all the same more or less. But, I didn't have holidays, I had to earn money to pay off debts and to live. I didn't have time to learn bongo drums, I was working in Falmer bar and the Crypt every other night. I had a good time. I liked it, mostly. It was only RockSoc nights that I didn't like. In fact I hated them. Terrible music, and really loud.

The second time I went to counselling, I was intervening on my own behalf. I was trying to give myself a bit of space to process the end of a long relationship and the beginning of a new life – I was being mature and sensible. Unfortunately the women I saw was not. I felt she was colluding with me at times – which was never going to do me any favours. So, if I go to Goldsmiths I would have to find a shit hot therapist, and then start to process the last 10 years of my life – I don't relish that. Not, as it happens, at all!

In addition, I need to find a studio space and to get my act together on the artistic front. I've got the ball rolling with this already. I am secretary, don't you know, of the all new, 'Parents Artists Group'. A Brighton based newly forming group of parents who are also artists and want to make work. At the moment we are a select bunch looking for space in Fabrica and at the Phoenix. Our aims are simple: to support each other to find space and time for creative expression.

We want to start an experimental programme of creating work in collaboration. We expect that our membership will be no more than 10-12, artists (parents) from a variety of art forms (dance, drama, writing, textiles, painting and sculpture). We will apply for funding to carry out a pilot programme consisting of around 6 sessions to plan and make artwork. All bodies of artwork produced during those sessions will, we hope, be exhibited to the public in a group exhibition. The themes may be parenthood and art and the struggle to find the balance and explore the tensions in both - on a daily basis. However, the actual focus of the work will evolve through a process of working together.

So that's all good. Art stuff is being pursued. That leaves finding funds to pay for the MA and for getting Winifred into nursery at least two days a week. That's £37 per day! Also, it means for the next three years (!) I am going to be a nightmare to be around while I struggle to manage my life, my relationship, my child, my future. Any thoughts anyone?

A week in Cornwall

I just spent a week in St. Agnes in a smallish cottage in Rosemundy with my mum and nearly 2 year old daughter. I went to get away from the falling down ceiling in the bedroom which builders had arrived to stick back up and my mum so she could have a very much needed half term break.

It was a tough week. Not only was it really freezing cold and wet, but Winni my daughter was ill more or less the whole time. Apart from being scary at times; her coughing through the night, temperature rises and her general lethargy it also affected her behaviour towards me and my mum. She became super clingy to me and if I looked away for a moment or tried to have a conversation she would raise a small hand and say 'hit!' towards my mum. If not hit then it would be a whispered 'kick!'. Fortunately, my mum didn't take it personally but by the end of the week even she was finding it slightly unnerving. This was odd and tiring. She is back to her cheerful self, my daughter that is - still with snotty nose but then I think that's here to stay at least until summer.

In the midst of illness we did make it to two table top sales and I went to a jumble sale in the Scouts Hut. What a great idea to have a jumble sale on a Friday evening! There wasn't much stuff to be had and anyway I am not as good as I once was at spotting it! I used to go to jumbles every Saturday religiously. Especially as a kid with my mum and then again when I was at University and trying to support myself with a stall at Camden Market. Jumble sales and charity shops were a necessity. In those days coming home with a black sack brimming over with 5p purchases was the norm.

I went to a jumble sale first one in ages a couple of weeks ago with my friend Jo in a village just outside Brighton called Ditchling. It was £1 to get in and then everything was 50p. I thought this was a bit much but then we did get some good bits and pieces. I had glimmers of the old excitement and nerves standing in the queue and watching it grow slowly as the minutes ticked by. Sussing out the potential competition and making judgements about what people nearer the front of the queue might be going for. In the early days I was very single minded. I knew what to look for and in what order to sweep the stalls. I could spot an interesting fabric from across the room. Also, if you had made the decision that people ahead of you were not dealers then the whole thing was quite leisurely however, if there were others with 'an eye' then it all became a much more extreme sport.

We went to The Tate in St.Ives, the Eden Project, and the Lost Gardens of Heligan (although we didn't actually go in - it would have been £8.50 each and really Winni was not at all up to it. We had the good fortune of asking a gardener what there was to see and he said not a lot at this time of the year). I managed to get a wheel clamp in St. Ives and even my spontaneous bursting into distraught teariness were not enough to appeal to the human beingness in the humourless man who silently took £74 off me. I did ask him if, human being to human being there was any way he could let up with this clamping? He was not a human being and could not be appealed to! It did cross my mind to beg as possibly my only real chance of getting any sympathy - but I just could not bring myself to. I had left Winni and my mum down by the harbour eating chips. When I finally got back to pick them up in the van we all got so caught up in my rage against the inhumanity of the car park mafia that I drove off and left the buggy in the middle of the road!

Rosemundy, is a two way street. St. Agnes is incredibly well connected by bus to all areas and Rosemundy is very much on the bus route (as we found out!) even though it's really steep and cars park in what turns out to be a particularly key spot on the hill. Every other bus that charges up this little lane is foiled by the row of cars parked on the right half way up. I went out one evening to have a look.

Mum and I had got a little freaked out by the passengers on the lower deck staring at us in our sitting room and those on top into our bedroom. The bus had come to a halt because it couldn't get through the narrow gap left by the parked cars. The driver called the depot to let them know. Everyone on the bus got more and more grumpy. Soon, the passengers abandoned their travelling plans and got off the bus. Then the bus driver starts to reverse down the hill to find an alternative route. Not an easy thing to do. I really wanted to have a conversation with someone about how this tiny little road ever came to be a carrier of buses - both ways. At least make it one way! Maybe I should speak to the owner of the cottage about getting some more heavy duty nets curtains and triple double glazing?

10 minutes

I have an interview tomorrow afternoon at Goldsmiths for an MA in Art Psychotherapy. I have 10 minutes to present myself as a practicing artist with a portfolio of artwork as part of a group interview! My wonderful friend Jo spent Friday evening with me. We drank sparkling wine (my first drop of alcohol in 40 days – well almost) and we went through all my art work and together we worked out something about the journey that I have been on over the last few years - and here it is...

I did an O and A level in art. I think I got an A for the former and a B for the latter. I didn't go to art school at 19 although I might have done but instead I headed for Sussex to do Social Anthropology which not only sounded fantastic (I had never heard of it as a subject before then) but meant that I wouldn't be following in my mum or dad's footsteps. They would know nothing (for once) about what I was learning. Some years later after doing many many averagely interesting evening classes I decided to go for an Art Foundation. Two years part time and just down the road at City College. I wanted the opportunity to apply myself and make a commitment to my art.

I spent two years taking my art and myself seriously (!) and decided to make it all about developing and honing my drawing and painting skills. Using pencil, charcoal, paint and ink I explored form and the line using my body as my subject. Only because it was there and I could access it easily. I was not at this point thinking in terms of my drawing having any actual relationship to me as the subject. I was looking at artists like Lucian Freud, Stanley Spencer, Euan Uglow and marvelling at their skill.

Then I discovered Jenny Saville and was totally blown away. Her work made me really want to paint and think about form. She works a lot from photos. Learning this, I took permission from her, which I now realise I had been doing all along without being aware of it. I started working from photos taken of different parts of my body, then drawing from them. My exploration of self in sketchbooks began with lots of looking and working stuff out.

Around this time I found out I was pregnant. I decided to continue with the course without really knowing how it would work out and started a fantastic sculpture class in the hope of taking my figurative work further. Every week I drove across country for 40 minutes to get to Partridge Green and work in a drafty studio with a small group at the sussex sculpture studios. Working from the figure in clay was really powerful. But almost more exciting was drawing from the contorted body (what was left of my beautiful sculpture) that I pulled from the mould. It was more interesting somehow than my sculpture – mirroring perhaps how I was feeling about my changing pregnant body.

About the same time I went to see Louise Bourgeois at the Tate. I marvelled at her fantastic little figures made from fabric found about her own home. Mother and child images – disturbing and beautiful. I decided that I too could use my life and pregnancy as the subject of my own art. It was time to confront my self censorship so I started looking at images of mother and child and motherhood in art; Henry Moore, Mary Kelly, Frida Khalo. Having found Tracey Emin's work annoyingly self referential and self absorbed - I realised that actually I was doing the same without really owning it.

At the same time as my body was changing we started to prepare our flat by ripping out the kitchen to make a space for a baby room. This meant unexpectedly that I got to have a little studio – the domestic space started to become really important. I could have several pieces of work on the go at the same time. Using paint I started looking at space, lines and the structure of the kitchen which was being built. I was dwelling on the external (home) and internal (pregnancy) space.

Once the baby arrived I went home to my mums in Suffolk where I grew up. I needed some familiar space and to get away from the chaos at home. I took lots of photos around the garden of the barn which I started working from in paint and charcoal. Finding the line and drawing back into the image. I really enjoyed working from these images that mean so much to me. I started to have 'feelings' while I was painting. This hadn't happened before – not quite like that!

Trying to find a focus for my final major project, in my 'studio space' I was exploring figures and self portraits again. This time it was an inter-generational theme – my mum and the baby, my dad and the baby – me. Even tho they won't meet, I was thinking - my mum and dad could be linked perhaps, through my paintings and through my baby. It's a bit nostalgic, but I was using my skills and trying to bring all of what I had learnt together.

An abstract figurative painting and an explosion of expression. I finally realised that my work had to be about what I am going through – a major life experience – why avoid it when it's such a huge life changing event. Embrace it I think. Also, as much as I enjoyed making the self portraits they just weren't very dynamic.

Making a large scale painting about the death of me and the beginning of motherhood based on photos Mike took in the Pompidiou – I look at line, colour, tone, space, figure, identity – everything goes in! The baby in the painting staring out beneath a very vivid and colourful blanket is the same baby that watches me from her pram as I paint. The whole process enables me to manage my transition into motherhood – I have more than one major project to work on and that suits me very well.

I have spent a few months looking at art and thinking. Anish Kapoor over the summer in Brighton, Pop Life at the Tate; Emin and Lucas in particular, Turner, Turner Prize, Saatchi Gallery and the Abstract America exhibition. Looking at other people's art gives me inspiration and motivation. I notice what I do and don't like. In the Saatchi gallery – one room literally drains the energy right out of me. I don't like the work in the room and it's exhausting just sharing space with it. I look more and read more about Tracey Emin and start to really admire her bravery. I am thinking about hidden realities and truths, the mundanity, the every day and about domesticity.

I have started an experimental drawing phase. I am drawing figures fast and furiously and it's not about skill now but about movement and expression about space behind and about the line. It's free – it's more abstract. Drawing in charcoal from moving images projected on the wall is so difficult and so incredibly great.

I am ready to begin and take confidence. To be emotive. I have worked out some very important stuff preparing for the interview. I have been on a major journey and I am in it for the long hall. All my thinking and feeling has to go into my work. I am ready to bring the thoughts and visuals to together – the body and the mind – and see what happens??

The body and mind hold the emotion – the unseen – hidden truths – the tension between containment and overflow, hiding and holding it all together. I see a body bursting at the seams – with ideas and excitement, tied up with brown string – and that's how I feel right now.

I will hear back from Goldsmiths about the interview in a few weeks time. I think it went quite well.

Pots of Liquid Flesh

It was a Friday evening. Mike and Bill were playing chess and I was surfing the internet searching for images of Lucian Freud’s paintings. Suddenly I stumbled across a painting by Jenny Saville, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Excitedly I encouraged my companions to leave their chessboard for a moment and share in my discovery…

Jenny Saville grew up in Cambridge. She studied painting and drawing at Glasgow School of Art from 1989, catching the end of eleven years of Thatcherism. Unemployment was officially nearly 3 million, the unpopularity of the new poll tax charge had led to riots in London and as far as Thatcher was concerned, there was no such thing as society. On April 10th 1992, the year of Saville’s graduation, John Major led the Conservatives into power for a fourth term in office contrary to expectations.

Thatcher’s legacy was powerful, pervasive and left a significant impression on the young artists in the late 80’s and early 90’s. She had successfully appealed to the lowest common denominator and relieved us of any social conscience. The resulting mediocre, banal, mass consumer culture was accompanied by a raw, edgy selfishness and a widening gap between the have’s and have not’s. The yuppy - me first society was born, with a mindless pursuit of wealth and a tremendous growth in the art market.

The generation of artists emerging from the art schools in the late 1980’s (as Saville was just beginning) were known as Young British Artists (YBAs). Government funding cuts had left art schools struggling to survive. Students and teachers were making work that reflected their experiences of what was happening in Britain and their reactions to Thatcherism. Goldsmith’s College was at the forefront of major changes in art schools across the country. Abolishing the traditional divisions between the painting, sculpture and photography departments, lecturers inculcated a belief in their students that from day one they were artists.

The students from Goldsmiths – who became the YBA’s - were self confident, worked together to promote themselves and challenged what they saw as the complacency of the establishment. They used found objects, quotations and deconstruction to make art that represented themselves and their relationship to society. They also aimed to actively engage the spectator in the experience of looking as Saville would do later in her own work.

In 1997, Saville took part in the controversial Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art, alongside fellow YBA’s; Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Gary Hume, Jake and Dinos Chapman and Chris Ofili. The press had a field day with the, “raw humour, nastiness, inventiveness, obscenity, aggression, beauty, insouciance and failures of the work.” The Daily Mail rechristened the museum “The Royal Academy of Porn”.

“Not since the 60’s, when David Hockney bleached his hair, donned a gold lame jacket and became a painter-celebrity, has the London art scene generated so much interest,” wrote a journalist in 1999 describing Sensation as “the defining contemporary art collection of a nation”. With the YBAs, London became a centre of the international art world, a source of export to the New York art scene and a magnet for New York gallery owners.

I went to the Sensation Exhibition in 1997 and can remember the shark in formaldehyde, Mueck’s 'Dead Dad', and 'Myra' by Marcus Harvey, but I don’t remember Saville which, perhaps, says something about the hype at the time. While Saville was one of the YBA’s, albeit two or three year’s younger than Damian Hirst et al. her work seems to be less well known probably because it was less controversial and possibly because she is a painter and her subject the female nude.

Saville grew up looking at Freud, Bacon and Auberach. She was drawn to artists that depict the body like Velasquez and Courbet. De Kooning she describes as her ‘main man’ whose work she feels, pushes the medium of paint.8 She has often been compared to Freud but is closer to Bacon and de Kooning in her own opinion. Pondering her comparison to Freud, Linda Nochlin argues that Saville is at heart a conceptual artist, whereas Freud is a traditional painter trying to look as though he has a concept.

At Glasgow, Saville found only one female painting tutor but she followed in the footsteps of Scottish painters like Stephan Campbell, Ken Currie, and Peter Howson, all of whom had the same tutor - Sandy Moffat.9 She learnt about feminism and its influences on art practice and was influenced by work of French feminists Luce Irigary and Julia Kristeva and the artist Cindy Sherman.

Feminist critiques of representation at the time were arguing that the image of ‘women’ was constructed by men through a male dominated media and shaped the way women saw themselves and how they experienced being a women.10 These ideas were reflected by female artists. Even as a child looking through art books, Saville realised there were no women artists and she started to wonder why not.

"Could I make a painting of a nude in my own voice?” she asked, “It's such a male-laden art, so historically weighted. The way women were depicted didn't feel like mine, too cute. I wasn't interested in admired or idealised beauty."

Saville uses masses of photographs to create her ‘monumental nudes’. Often they are photographs of herself or bits of her friend’s bodies. They are not self portraits as Saville has said herself in the Monograph interview with David Sylvester, “I use me all the time because it’s really reliable, you’re there all the time”. She also likes the idea of using herself because “it takes you into the work”. She talks about how women have so often been the subject-object and this has an important implication for her not wanting to be just the person ‘looking and examining’. Females, as she says, are used to being looked at and she wants to be able to do both; looking and being looked at.

She also works from photographs of bruises and other injuries from medical textbooks. All are used as reference. Finding out what causes a stretch mark from a medical book, for example, helps her understand how to paint them. She’s aware of the ‘snobbery’ against using photos when painting from life - but doesn’t care. Using photographs of fragments of the body is a pragmatic approach particularly given the sheer size of her paintings and her subject. She doesn’t paint while looking at the figure. Instead she will have a model for a day and take rolls of film of close ups. Then, climbing up and down scaffolding with the use of a grid and mirrors she embarks on her paintings.

She is really interested in painting areas of flesh rather than the female body as such. “It’s as if the paint tends to become the body… When I put the paint on in layers, it’s like adding layers of flesh. There are areas of thick flesh, where the paint becomes more dense”. She mixes up large quantities of different colours in maybe three hundred pots rather than working from a palette. She tries to paint in a sculptural way.

Nochlin, who famously asked first in 1970 and again in 1980, ‘Why have there been no great women artists?” is impressed with Saville’s ‘painterliness’ and thinks she is one of the most interesting and exciting painters of our time. She writes about her work, “although the surface and the grid both play an important role in Saville's formal language, both are melted down and sharpened up by the virtuoso yet oddly repulsive brushwork that marks her style”.

In what may be her most current interview in May 2005 Simon Shama asked Jenny Saville about the types of bodies she paints. Her answer to this question and her analysis seem more sophisticated than earlier interviews.

“I try to find bodies that manifest in their flesh something of our contemporary age…I don’t paint portraits in a traditional sense at all. If they are portraits, they are portraits of an idea or a sensation”.

While living in New York, Saville observed the work of a plastic surgeon, Dr. Barry Martin Weintraub. She took photos of the operations and became interested in the ‘manipulations’ that could be made to the body. Importantly for her work she also gained insight into the psychological factors behind these changes to the body.

I stumbled across Jenny Saville’s work by accident. I was looking at images of Lucian Freud’s paintings, which I have been drawn to since I first saw them as a teenager, and found some images of Saville’s figures which really excited me. I was drawn to the images, without realising that the canvases were so huge. I find the fact she’s a female painter - inspiring. I read about her working from photographs which was a bit of a shock but also a relief. I had been trying to paint from the nude (using myself in the mirror) and felt I now had permission to explore working from photographs. This gave me something new to explore in my own work which felt liberating.

When I look at ‘Branded’, ‘Prop’, or ‘Propped’, all painted in 1992 or ‘Plan’ which is 9x7ft painted in 1993 and I mark out with a tape measure on my sitting room wall the dimensions and imagine sitting in front of the painting looking up at those images - I ask myself what these paintings are about. My head is full of the critiques I have read - some almost impossible to comprehend and a little intimidating. I see images that are strong and bold and by which I am humbled. I wonder if Saville gives us a female body – a nude – which makes us work. My eye darts across the paintings and I flick between the full paintings and the close up photographs to try and understand how the paint is applied to create these fleshy bodies. They are not easy on the eye and that is not their intention.

‘Plan’ draws me in, holds me transfixed and I crave to be able to stand in front of the real thing. These are unfamiliar images of the female body. Those available for public consumption (in newspapers, magazines and even in art) tend to be idealised images of a beautiful, thin female body. Saville’s bodies are ordinarily covered up or left indoors. Big breasts may be desirable but Saville’s breasts are huge colossal mammaries that are intimidating, hardly sexually alluring. These bodies do not lend themselves to voyeurism.

The naked body in ‘Plan’ is brave and bold. The towering figure looks down and demands your attention in a way that other common images of female bodies do not. I wonder whether these nudes are attractive to the male gaze and I think probably not. If her work critiques the young, alluring female body which has long belonged to the male painter/artist – I wonder if Saville’s naked bodies intend to confront or even repulse the average male viewer. They certainly don’t facilitate the normal consumption of the female form which, it could be argued, has been legitimated by a male aesthetic approach to figurative art. In this sense ‘Plan’ liberates the viewer and the figure depicted is liberated too.