Life Drawing with 2bornot2b Collective - "Jenny Saville" with Margo and Helen

SUNDAY 12th SEPTEMBER 12pm-2pm

2B Or Not 2B Collective x OCA Session:  "Jenny Saville" with Margo and Helen 

"Helen Roeten and Margo Strijp are artists and artmodels from the Netherlands. Both are curvy ladies.

Jenny Saville is an artist that inspires us. Her series about obese women and her selfportraits are the inspiration for our poses. " - Helen and Margo.

About Jenny Saville :

Saville was able to observe a New York City plastic surgeon at work. Studying the reconstruction of human flesh was formative in her perception of the body—its resilience, as well as its fragility. Her time with the surgeon fueled her examination into the seemingly infinite ways that flesh is transformed and disfigured. She explored medical pathologies; viewed cadavers in the morgue; examined animals and meat.

Saville’s work interrogates our perceptions of the female body in challenging ways. To use the self in this way is to come full circle in the questioning of fixed identity and the body” (Meskimmon 125). She challenges the male fantasy of the perfect body and opens doors to alternative notions of beauty.

Saville fights society’s ideal of the perfect body by showing her own enlarged and distorted body, which becomes the opposite of the skin and bones we see on the covers of magazines. In many paintings, she uses her own head and face and the body of an obese woman. Jenny Saville has visualised her concern about the tyranny wielded over women by the fantasy of the perfect body in a series of larger-than-life-size nudes overlain with contour lines, words, and the kind of marks made by plastic surgeons in preparation for their cuts. Her innovation was to use her own distorted and enlarged nude body" (Rideal 31). She also defies the “male gaze” as she faces the viewer and one cannot ignore that she is actively making a bold statement about the female body.

The fact that most of her paintings and photographs depict the body covering the entirety of the canvas, and sometimes spilling over the edges, adds to the drama of viewing the human body’s flesh and imperfections. “Saville’s self-portrait nudes overwhelm in their excess” (Meskimmon 123-124). From this perspective, we see the details of these imperfections, and in some paintings we see the body with markings similar to that of a plastic surgeon and provocative words etched into the skin. These in-your-face enlarged and distorted views of the human body force the viewer to reflect on their own self-image and distorted views and emotions about their own body. “They draw out something that is repressed or obscure in the viewer’s experience and bring it to light” (Gray 8). She creates emotion by filling the field of view with raw flesh. ----------------------------------------------------------------

About 2B Or Not 2B Life Drawing Collective:

2B Or Not 2B Collective are a BIPOC run life drawing group based in London with an international audience, and their objective is to uplift marginalised and underrepresented models whilst unifying different communities through art. They focus on fostering new connections, artistic development as well as mental wellbeing.

Since coming online, they've been sponsored by Lululemon in their Keep Going '21 Campaign, partnered with The National Gallery, featured in Griff’s live stream from Tate Modern, and currently have partnerships with the NHS, UAL and Bafta nominated animation studios such as Cartoon Saloon to name a few.

They've featured all types of models from BIPOC, trans, plus sized, models with visible disabilities, to acrobats, dancers and have raised money for numerous charities such as Mind, Impact Lebanon and The Trussel Trust.

Their online sessions are and always have been pay-what-you-can to make art accessible to all with a focus on fair pay for models and collaborators.

For more information and updates you can follow:

Instagram: www.instagram.com/2bornot2bcollective

Website: www.2bornot2bcollective.com

Replay Library: www.gumroad.com/2bornot2bcollective

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