‘Your work changed the course of my entire life’: novelist Douglas Stuart meets painter Jenny Saville

He was a struggling 16-year-old when he first saw her paintings. Now, the Booker prize-winning author of Shuggie Bain sits down with the record-breaking artist to talk early success, bad reviews, and the joys of making artIn the summer of 1992, I was a 16-year-old who was watching his mother drink herself to death. I had a desperate need to find work and somewhere to stay, and so remaining in education didn’t seem like a possibility. I had two teachers who saw how I was struggling. They dreamed a future for me that I could never have imagined for myself. One evening they took me up to the degree show at the Glasgow School of Art, and there I came face to face with the paintings of Jenny Saville.The power of that encounter has never left me. Those images were fierce and confrontational. A few months after the degree show, I lost my mother to her addiction. With the support of my teachers, I eventually finished school and went on to art school and built a career in design. Meanwhile, the GSA degree show formed a body of work that would lead to Jenny’s ascension into the Young British Artist movement – with her works appearing on the covers of Manic Street Preachers’ albums The Holy Bible and Journal for Plague Lovers – and help cement her reputation as one of the greatest British painters of any generation. Continue reading...

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