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
·
Stephen
Ongpin Fine Art, Jenny Saville (1970),
http://www.stephenongpin.com/Jenny-SAVILLE-1970-Mother-and-Children-After-the-Leonardo-Cartoon-DesktopDefault.aspx?tabid=6&tabindex=5&objectid=629969&categoryid=15416
·
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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