Jenny Saville research homework

Jenny Saville is a British artist, best know for her large scale paintings and life drawings.
The thing that strikes me most about her work is her unique way of arranging her models, often using a sheet of glass or perhaps a window to get a view that would otherwise be impossible.
Using the glass, the models press themselves up against the surface, this gives quite an interesting perspective for drawing and would most likely be different every time.

I think her work is very unique, and definately not something Ive seen from other artist before.

And not just this, but the other ways she positions her models and even expands the picture with her imagination makes for yet more interesting works.
 An example of this would be this piece, where the models are positioned so close that their skin is pressed up against each others in places, and Jenny has actually turned them into conjoined twins.

I have personally been the subject of a GCSE piece a few years ago, where me and my twin sister had to model like this for a student, who had chosen Jenny Saville to be her projects' inspired artist.

Another thing to note would be the way she uses colour, which she purposely doesn't blend together in places, which leaves a somewhat rugged or in some cases injured look.

Overall I personally think her artwork is some of the most interesting Ive ever seen among artists, and certainly takes life drawing to her own level.

New topic: Life drawing (15.01.13)

Todays lesson marked the start of a new project, life drawing, in which we had a female model; Alison, come in and model for us.

Since it was our first lesson, we started off with today just drawing hands and feet, which are the two things I have most trouble drawing anyway, so the lesson itself was very beneficial for me, as we recieved helpful advice from our tutor, who said to use shapes to use as the framework of the sketch.

Our first attempt was done with pencil, and was before we recieved advice, so we just had to do the best we could to start off with. I tried drawing Alisons right foot, which didn't come out too bad in my oppinion, but lacks better shading and definition.

for my next attempt I took on the advice given to us, and drew a sort of rectangle shape for the body of the hand and a smaller rectangle for the thumb. I didn't finish it in time for the next pose so it doesn't look very impressive.

Next, we tried charcoal, which I found worked well for shading but struggled with actually drawing with it, making the lines a little over the top.

After this I had a few more attempts at drawing more positioned hands, which improved a little with the charcoal, becoming cleaner and sharper with the lines, the shapes of the hands were hard to draw, especially the one on the left hand side of this page.

My last appempt with charcoal was trying to draw both feet in posed positions. The position was good, but my drawing didn't end up being as good as I hoped.

Lastly, I had a go with a graphite stick, which I think was my favorite, I found it really easy to draw with and was much less messy, plus the drawing turned out to be pretty decent.

New fashion topic

The fashion issue: Body image


Presently, all kinds of media are portraying the 'Perfect' or 'ideal' body image, this kind of content is so common, but has had a large negative effect on the population, maybe even more so than it has a positive effect.
Through things like advertisement, films and other media, everyone is exposed to a inaccurate representation of the ideal look.
Modeling seems to be one of the main sources of this rising problem, depicts attractive people; typically women, portrays them as the right way to look. 
These women are stereotypically tall, beautiful, and incredibly thin, which a large percentage of people would agree this is a very unhealthy thing to advertise, especially to other young women; who are the most conscious people about their appearance of any of the world's population.
Some women take their appearance very seriously, and will do just about anything to look perfect, this ranges from plastic surgery to developing all kinds of eating disorders. Media is arguably the main reason these things happen, with over 40,000 plastic surgeries carried out in 2011 in the UK alone, which has risen every year so far.
people; typically women, who make up 90% of the UK's plastic surgery patients, feel pressurized by the media to change the way they look, hopefully to boost their self esteem and the way they appear to other people.
As far as the eating disorders go, coincidentally, the people most likely to develop eating disorders is females between the age of 12 and 25.
All of these things pose their own health risks, and all kinds of people put themselves through this to look good and have a perfect body image, and these figures will likely rise in the following years.