Are Women Really Some of The Best Artists?
With International Women’s month coming to an end but of course a never ending subject matter! We have celebrated some of the greatest and strongest women in art of course we need to celebrate not only some of the most amazing women artists but also how women have inspired some of the best art in the world. International Women’s Day 2021
One of the main female artists on this list for me would definitely have to be the amazing artist, Jenny Saville Jenny Saville | Artist | Royal Academy of Arts.
Saville’s work cannot help but grab your attention, not only due to large scale size of her canvasses but also her subject matter. Kick starting with her self-portrait back in the 90’s Saville’s work makes the viewer truly study her paintings, you can’t help but be somewhat mesmerised by her style and her messages. She embraces women and their raw strength, empowering all women through her honesty. Drawing no doubt, from the Renaissance masters and their classical influences admiring the beauty in women that we witness in so much work by artists such as Rubens & Titian but whilst also reminding us of the strong abstract portraits by other more contemporary masters such as Willem de Kooning, Bacon and Freud.
Saville’s portraits of women celebrate their bodies, she paints women as they may see themselves — maybe content, maybe tormented and yet ultimately completely empowered and unafraid to display their nudity, in all its shapes and sizes. She challenges the general vision and opinion of what is beautiful in the female nude and expresses this so strongly through composition, technique and style. It is a kind of brutal honesty in art that some may shy away from, others may embrace but whichever reaction you experience when you see her work, there is no doubt you cannot unsee or ignore the power of women in art in Saville’s influential and hugely important artworks.
