MfA Semester 2 - Research Paper 3 - Saville


            The mother and child relationship has always been a fascinating subject for artists throughout history. It is such a unique bond that it has caused countless artists, both male and female, to be drawn to the subject. Even artists who have never been parents have tackled this subject. During the Renaissance these mother and child portraits were one of the most frequently painted scenes as they were mostly meant to represent the Virgin and Child. Afterwards artists such as Renoir, Mary Cassatt, and Picasso, just to name a very few, would paint beautiful scenes of the mother and child together. Much more recently the artist Jenny Saville has put her own spin on this vastly popular subject. Inspired by one of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings, Saville’s painting, The Mothers, shows a much more realistic version of the relationship between a mother and her young children. By comparing Saville’s work to that of the previously mentioned artists, it becomes fascinating just how much the views of how children should be depicted, as well as the views of the mother-child or parent-child relationship, have changed over time.
            Born in Cambridge in 1970, Jenny Saville now lives and works as an artist in Oxford. She is most famous for her incredibly large and somewhat shocking figurative drawings and paintings. Much like Lucian Freud, Saville chooses not to idealize the people in her work and instead shows them for what they really are, flaws and all. Many of her most well know paintings are of obese or pregnant women, including some paintings of herself while pregnant. Saville is now a mother of two young children, and in an article written about her by Kelly Crow for the Wall Street Journal, Saville talks about how becoming a mother changed the way she painted as well as what she paints (online.wsj.com). The article talks about the added effort that it took for her to continue to work as an artist while pregnant as well as while being a mother of young children, including how she even had to change the types of paint that she would use in order to avoid using anything that may be toxic. This information, although it may seem unimportant to some, is actually very important because it shows just how being a mother directly effects your artwork, even beyond just the content of the work.  It is also something with which every artist today who is a mother can relate.
            Saville’s painting, The Mothers, is just one of the many paintings inspired by her experience as a mother. In this painting Saville shows herself seated and very pregnant, while attempting to hold her two children on her lap. The Mothers, which is a large scale work completed using a combination of paint and charcoal, is part of a series of drawings and paintings of herself holding her children while pregnant. Saville wanted to depict the intimate bond of the mother and child without causing the painting to be cute or sentimental in any way.
In addition to Saville’s experience as a mother, the idea for The Mothers was also largely influenced by Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and John the Baptist. In da Vinci’s drawing, as with many other mother and child works of art from that time, the Virgin Mary is shown seated with the infant Jesus on her lap. Any of these mother and child paintings created during the Renaissance generally show the child seated calmly on the mother’s lap as if he were a miniature adult. As this clearly not how a child behaves in reality, at least the majority of the time, Saville decided to create her own version of this idea though The Mothers. Instead of having her children seated nicely on her lap, she shows them squirming and uncooperative, which is much closer to the reality of how young children behave when being forced to remain seated for any period of time. The swirling lines of charcoal around the figures also help increase the feeling of motion and chaos throughout the paintings.
So much has changed from the time that da Vince and other Renaissance artists created their Madonna and Child images up until to now with Saville’s very un-idealized paintings of her personal motherhood experience. Although the subject has always been immensely popular with artists there have been such drastic change in the way this relationship, or even children in general, has been portrayed through art. Much of this change has to do with the changing view on motherhood, or more specifically what is seen as acceptable to society during that time. When comparing the chaotic mother and child images of Jenny Saville to the beautiful, chaos-free images of artists such as da Vinci, Renior, Picasso and Mary Cassatt, it must first be taken into consideration that three of those artists were men and the other had no children. During the times when these artists were alive and working, parenting was left mainly to the mother, which therefore allowed the fathers to enjoy some good moments with their children without really having to deal with anything less than enjoyable. With women begin primarily responsible for the children there was almost no time for the mother to also be an artist, and when there was it would be completely unacceptable to show motherhood as being anything less than perfect because then it would appear as though they were not doing their job as a mother correctly.
Views of parenting have very much changed now in our society, with both parents for the most part taking an equal role in parenting. Many parents have also finally begun to realize that it is unnecessary, if not harmful, to devote every waking moment to the happiness of their children and with more mothers taking on more than just parenting, there is the added chaos caused by the mix of work and children and everything happening at once. I feel that it is because of all of these changes in society we are now finally starting to see works of art, such as Saville’s The Mothers, that accurately capture the reality of being a parent. Images of mother and child were never shown in this way in the past. It may still seem shocking to some who are used to seeing this relationship as something that should be perfect, but people need to realize that it is liberating to accept that the chaos and imperfections of being a parent do not take away from how much you love you children.  
As with Jenny Saville, I too am interested in the mother and child relationship, however I chose to show this relationship from a different point of view. She chooses to paint herself into the image and have the viewer on the outside looking in at the relationship. With my current work I am choosing paint only my children in the image and therefore place myself as the viewer. The actual viewer is then placed in my position and is able to view the relationship as if they were the parent of my children. Despite this difference, I feel that our work and our experience is very similar. Unlike how it was in the past, I feel that there is no longer any reason to pretend that being a parent has no flaws. Also, at least in my opinion, being a parent would be rather boring without the chaos.


Sources:

·         Crow, Kelly. "Pregnancy Expands a Vision." The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones & Company, 10 Sept. 2011, http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903285704576559042315565146




·         Hudson, Mark. Jenny Saville: “I like the down and dirty side of things”.” The Telegraph, 24 June 2014. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/10920986/Jenny-Saville-I-like-the-down-and-dirty-side-of-things.html


·         Gagosian Gallery, Jenny Saville: Reproductive Drawings, 6 April 2010, https://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/april-15-2010--jenny-saville


·         Aries, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood - A Social History of Family Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962. Print.


·         Jenny Saville’s The Mothers


·         Renior’s Mother and Child

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