The Beechwood Airship Interviews

Did you ever find yourself trying to get reference material into the work because it’s around you?

‘Oh yeah, I collect a lot of bits of paint, like that thing there (points to a paint-smeared newspaper). 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 raw colour, there are scrapes of blue on the nose and cheek of Stare that seem to up the ante of reality and abstraction at one and the same time.

‘You can push the limits of it because you’ve got, say, this blue; the blue is there but I’ve pushed it, made it more extreme, but you can only go to a certain level of that and still keep a realism. You can go too far and have to come back – that’s what takes the time because … (digs out a three tone swatch) here we are, I know I can put that, that and that in any combination and those two will swing your eye over and the third will be a background – when I’m actually painting I can start to run things through that; they’re what give you the extra heightened reality.

The artists I like always can combine and move the nature of the medium they work in – be it paint, music or whatever. Radiohead are so good, they have such a good musical craft that they can push it so even something like the Shipping Forecast, they’re able to take that and move it. The people I like understand the nature of the material they work in and the nature of life; it’s the combination of putting those things together, melding and mixing, pulling it all in, that I respond to.

I used to have stacks of cookery books because I found photographs of cookery and food were really luscious. I collected a lot of things like that – fashion magazines because they always soup-up the body, they make the mouths more luscious, give the eyes more shadows – you can take elements of that, hyperbolic fashion shoots which twist reality a certain way and, if you’ve got the right eye, you can take all that and do something very interesting with it that’s not just superficial. It can be anything; the stain left by a dropped Coca-Cola on the floor – this human presence that’s been left on a pavement.’

You often have spatter and workings beneath your paintings – tea stains like scar tissue, paint running out of the frame.

‘A lot of that’s from Velázquez. I’ve got a picture somewhere where he shifted the edge so that most of this surface is literally raw, and Bacon did that too – raw canvas he then drew on top of. I like the idea that the material of the canvas itself becomes part of the image – you’re not just using the surface as something to cover up. You see the stain where I’ve painted this here? The oil that’s gone into the paint has gone into the paper. I’ve tried to replicate that in paintings so many times because I think it shows a sort of present. You see where the paint has slightly lifted off the paper there?’

You’re celebrating the process, then, embracing the canvas for what it is and the oily paint likewise.

‘I’m trying to get inside the mechanics of what paint is. I want paint to do something that only it can do. I know how to slide paint; how to put it on dry. I go through phases of wanting to use a lot of oil and slide the whole thing, really wet and then other times see the benefits of dragging dry paint over dry paint – the way it picks up the light slowly.’

The paint projecting to meet you.

‘An unkempt surface. We live in a time where a lot of things are hermetically sealed – I like it when I activate a surface and that surface is unique, it can’t be replicated in any way. I think that’s very human, that interest and need.

I was reading recently about Leonardo drawing a mother and child, how it took him two years to do it. Today, hardly any artist working, apart from Frank Auerbach probably, spends two years making a drawing. Our ability as humans to physically move faster hasn’t changed from Leonardo’s time; if you’ve got one stick of charcoal or Conté crayon or whatever, the ability to make a drawing hasn’t really shifted, so I think it’s interesting that art’s shifted according to the necessity for human speed – maybe that’s why the majority of art now isn’t made over a long period of time.’

Is your work exceptional in regard to the time you spend on it?

‘Yes, I think so. Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach – there are artists about who spend a lot of time on work. I don’t think there are a lot of people who’d choose to spend a lot of time on their own in a room, to be honest – not like this. I can spend three months mixing colours. Just mixing colours. Every day. And that’s before I’ve even got going. A lot of people don’t want to spend their days doing that.’

But you do.

‘I realised that I wanted to do this very young. I knew I would be labouring over making one piece and that what I wanted to do took a long time and I felt a kinship with people like Auerbach who goes to the studio every day, the same thing. It can seem very dogmatic but at the same time you have to stay in that painting space – if you want to make paintings you have to be in front of a painting by and large – unless you’re Jeff Koons and you get eighty people making them – if you want that one-on-one, Bacon-esque battle with the surface, you’ve got to stay inside a room … and you don’t really need a lot of other stuff around you; you need a bit of human contact so you don’t go mad, but actually it can be just a coffee with someone, a conversation on the telephone – enough contact so you’re linked but not so much that it consumes and distracts you. The Van Gogh letters at the RA recently were really interesting for that reason because Theo offered exactly the valve you need. Vincent just needed to get it out, to say, “I’m not completely isolated; I’m making this work and this is the progress,” and his brother would say, “Okay, great. Send me some drawings.” It was enough, a long piece of elastic so Vincent was out there but he wasn’t totally on his own.*

‘I used to get frustrated about painting, the fact that you’d make one painting and it’s just one and can only exist as that, whereas a lot of my friends were doing photography, what seemed a more versatile medium because it could exist in all different places, but now I feel completely different about that; I like that you make this singular object and it’s almost like a human performance – the trace of it. When you make a painting, every single bit of that process is in the document that’s left. It’s like speech almost, a collection of speech, so over the year of making a painting you’ve got a year of collected experience on the surface and that, for me, is an incredible document, and so to experience the work properly you have to see it in the flesh.

The Van Gogh show was incredible to see. The work that you’ve looked at in books a lot and think you know very well – some things are a bigger scale than you thought they were and the drawings are suddenly alive in the flesh.

‘The experience of having your body in front of the piece of work, I think that’s an entirely different thing from a reproduction, obviously.

If you stand in front of a great de Kooning you literally stand where he made that work. You can’t do that in another medium – you can’t do that with music. Even in writing, when you read a printed book, it transforms you and takes you somewhere else but you’re not actually in the creative moment, and I think painting is the closest you can get – apart perhaps from performance art – the closest to creation, if you like.’

• • • • •

How far do you look ahead and plan your future work?

‘Work comes out of work, I think. I’ve got certain aims as to where I want the work to go – this marriage between abstraction and realism, this space that oscillates between those two things. Certain artists couple that and make a dialogue between them. I’m not near it. I’m trying to get near it but I’ve learnt from doing paintings over the years that that’s a journey you have to accept. You can’t get there easily; you make jumps and then plateau a bit and then make another jump and then you’ve got to ride the plateau and when it starts to go, that’s when you’ve got to be brave and really push. Sometimes I’ll be in a painting session and I’ll completely trash the painting.’

Do you then try and get it back to where it was or work on with what you’ve got?

‘I work with what I’ve got. I know I’ve got to ride it – you’re in a game at that point and you’ve got to try and pull the strings because I try to make marks and each mark is like the way you play a note – you have to decide how you’re going to play it – but when you’re really on form or you’re really in it you don’t even think about the way you’re playing it, you just play. Sometimes you’re just awful and you say, “None of this works,” but then, often, you can turn a corner and, because it really doesn’t work, you’ll make a huge leap because, “Fuck it. I might as well try this and this.” You do two or three things and then suddenly you think, “There’s something in that.”

The mixing of the colours beforehand gives you the ability to get to that space.’

You’re grounded by that.

‘I know I’ve got a sort of safety net. If all else fails I can scrape it all down and just panel-in that tone and it will smooth that side of the neck, or whatever, but the best bits of my paintings usually come out of mistakes. A sort of desperation; it’s like driving and getting lost, not having a map and going another way and then, suddenly, you’ve got to the place you wanted to get to but you’ve gone by a different route.’

• • • • •

The ground floor of the studio consists of a single open room stretching from concertina doors at the front to multi-paned windows at the back. Jenny’s drawing studio takes up about a quarter of the floor space – a curtain of clear plastic sheet hangs down to divide this portion off and contain the warmth of two electric fan heaters which buzz and tick beside us now as we stand, surrounded on three sides by large charcoal drawings of mother and child. Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci,* each cartoon is over-drawn to depict multiple scenes, like a triple-exposed film – the figures frozen in three acts. My eyes pick up and follow a line, a leg or a hand, and then recognise the rest of the drawing to which it belongs before skipping over to another detail or action. It’s quite disorientating and in these moments the babies seem to be multi-limbed and flailing … and I realise, standing there, how quickly I’ve taken for granted how mind-blowing Jenny’s work is because I’m describing it as disorientating and hypnotic when what I should be telling you is what it’s like to stand with an artist in the space where she creates work that I imagine would delight the pillars of the Renaissance. It’s shock and awe. It’s awesome and very moving … and I don’t want to jump ahead and spoil the end but I wasn’t able to revisit Jenny after this meeting and that aspect of this chapter – it being a unique four-hour encounter – means the details are rendered rich and vivid in my mind. We got a lot done, talked and walked around before the work, peered close where the paint became a livid landscape and smelt of sour gummy turps and stood back where the apparently disparate shards and pocks of paintings focused to form these remarkable wholes. We drank tea. We spoke about Duncan Jones’s film Moon, W.G. Sebald’s De Emigrés and I told Jenny about G.K. Chesterton’s essay ‘A Defence of Skeletons’* and then it was over and I was back out on the street and everything was prosaic by comparison for a long time afterwards, the focus and colour lost – as if I’d been drinking tea with a phoenix and now had to go back to rubbing two sticks together.

But I didn’t know that yet as we stood downstairs among the drawings.

‘I’ve used drawing a lot but never really wanted to exhibit them, whereas these are different. I’m trying to make something where you can read several things all at the same time and it’s really from looking at the internet. You don’t have one stream of information now – not one and then another – it’s many things that exist and are seen together. You’d never get that from these drawings but that’s where my thinking came from; you can see the workings of ideas.’

The draughtsmanship is brilliant. Are you self-taught or did you get a lot from art school in this respect?

‘I went to a very traditional art school. Life drawing every night from seven until nine. Thirty-six life drawings a term – whether you painted abstract, whatever you did. Obviously I liked it because I wanted to paint the figure.’

I’ve read that you teach, is that right? When did that start? Is it useful to you?

‘I used to teach a lot more. I used to teach at the Slade, UCL, but I really prefer the school of Eileen Guggenheim in New York – a graduate figurative school. Warhol bankrolled it quite a bit at the start. You can go and do a class on how to paint like Velázquez, you can do sculpting directly from the figure. It’s very traditional but you learn tangible skills. I do a workshop there that I was taught when I was at art school; a tutor showed me how to mix colour and he made me make a painting with squares – mixing a tone and putting it down so you make a space invader figure. Each square had to be a tone. It forces you to think behind a shoulder – “How do you make tone a piece of space? How do you decide what that tone is going to be?” There are no lines, just tone, and so I pass that on and they really struggle for about three days and then, after about the fifth day, they start to make progress because they’re then allowed to make half-squares, triangles, so you can do the edges of shoulders until, finally, you get something … I always say to them, “You’re not making art. This has nothing to do with art. This is an exercise in looking.”’

Articulation.

‘Yes! It’s about articulation. There’s not a lot of instruction in art schools now. People are quite ashamed of having skills, actually. I’ve always thought, “I want to show off as much as possible!” (Laughs) I don’t really see why I should be apologetic about that. I want to articulate. I think that, if you’re intent on doing something, then you need to be able to articulate how to do it and … you know, the amount of students I’ve had who’ve painted a broken hand or foot that they can’t articulate and have constructed a philosophy around that painting to justify it because they can’t do it. I think that’s part of the big problem with painting: there’s been a whole construct of “bad painting is good painting”. I find that annoying.’

Jenny trails off to a glum shrug. The fan heater clicks and whirs. The plastic sheet walls whisper and we stand there in silence for a moment.

Is most of your current work about pregnancy?

‘No. I’d like to mix it up a bit. I don’t really want to do a “Mother” thing. I’ve noticed from looking at art history that the notion of mother and child is very much a fantastical idea but it’s fucking visceral, giving birth; it’s unbelievable. You have a body coming out of your body. That is weird.’

I’ve always thought having a baby must be incredibly scary – this thing growing inside you, getting bigger – the amount of horror films based around that premise.

‘Alien.’

Eraserhead. Videodrome …

‘What struck me most about Miracles of Life, Ballard’s last book, was that he talks about this baby arriving that’s a new life yet looks like it’s been there for centuries – such an ancient, animalistic thing. That was quite a shock, I didn’t know how I’d feel but you are absolutely an animal in that moment … it was very close to painting and, it’s technical but I had a difficult birth; after my daughter was born a surgeon had to come and remove part of my stomach and all the placenta by hand – literally grabbing handfuls of placenta out of my body and putting it onto a table next to me. I was looking at that and, in that moment, I was in a Francis Bacon painting. I thought, “I am never going to make paintings in the same way again.” It was incredible – seeing the inside of your body being pulled out. I could feel the surgeon’s hand at the top of my ribcage – while his arm was inside me.’

James Herriot stuff.

‘Really like that, really profound; an incredibly intense moment. I’ve worked under medical light before, the feeling of medical light – so all the colours, the greens and the reds, are very intense, but at the same time I had just become a mother so I had just given birth to this little girl and I had all this going on at the same time. I saw painting everywhere.’