Recently I’ve been toying with the idea of attempting more portraits. I was reasonably pleased with the little sketch I did of my wife recently. The announcement that our regular life-drawing class will be restarting very soon has re-enforced that interest. Having been loaned a book about Egon Schiele and Jenny Saville recently my thinking about the subject has started to gain some focus.
At first I was wondering why on earth Schiele and Saville would be seen as subjects for a shared discussion. When I dipped into it, however, it began to make sense. It struck me that they might both be described as having a “dystopian” view of the human body. As I reflected further on the subject I realised that there have been different approaches to depicting the human body that could almost be described as “schools”. The “classical” body is not the same as the “romantic” body, for example. Both of these approaches set out to show us, in one way or another, idealised conceptions of the human body.
Stanley Spencer’s nudes, while refusing to engage in that kind of idealisation in any way, and insisting upon absolute honesty in his depiction of bodies, can never be described as “dystopian”. There is an evident acceptance of things simply as they are. I suppose that in this respect he has something in common with Degas. The same can be said to be the case with Alice Neel. I hadn’t encountered he work until very recently. She was an American painter who dies in 1984. She had that capacity to simply accept what it is that she saw in an entirely non-judgemental way.
I can feel the ground opening up beneath my feet here, and I wonder if I might be slipping into a rather large discussion …. perhaps into quite a lot of work!