In 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.
I have often returned to Jenny’s paintings as inspiration for my writing, especially when thinking about the body, the clarity of a child’s gaze, a mother’s vulnerability. Writing is my way of painting. I try to conjure pictures in the minds of my readers and surround them with a world that feels as vivid as any visual work. Jenny’s paintings contain many narratives; that of the image, loaded with emotion, tenderness, brutality, movement. But they also contain the narrative of their own making. You can read the journey a painter takes, following her decisions through every brushstroke. It is not unlike the sketching and building and drafting of a novel.
On the occasion of Jenny’s crowning retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery in London, I wanted to revisit what her paintings have meant to me. So, 33 years after that fateful summer in Glasgow, we spent the afternoon together in her studio in Oxford and finally had the chance to talk.
Douglas Stuart Looking back now, what do you think your 22-year-old self would think about this show at the National Portrait Gallery?
Jenny Saville Well, it’s exciting. My 20s were an incredible time. Before that, I had waitressing jobs alongside being at art school. But during the summer between my third and fourth year, I worked to put enough money in the bank so that I wouldn’t have to. And I learned a lesson about time: that it was the most precious aspect of life. It was wonderful to be able to paint every day: everything came together, and my degree show had my first mature pictures.
DS Did you always know that you wanted to work in paint?
JS I always painted or made things from a young age. The permission for creativity was strong in my upbringing. My parents were teachers and would encourage creativity.
DS In a lot of ways, you were the one who gave me my first creative awakening. Growing up in Glasgow, I’d never been to a museum or a gallery. A couple of art teachers at school could see I was struggling. One night after school, they said: “Look, just come with us,” and took me up to the Glasgow School of Art to the 1992 degree show. A lot of it was lost on me, because I was only a kid. But then I turned the corner and there was Propped, and although I didn’t understand all the layers of it, I was blown away. In that one moment, your work changed the course of my entire life.
JS Was that the first time you went to the building?
DS First time. I grew up less than a mile away from it and hardly knew it existed. Even if I had, I would have been intimidated; working-class kids don’t always feel that they’re invited into those circles.
When I was writing [Douglas’s 2020 debut novel] Shuggie Bain, I looked at Trace (1993–94) a lot. It was an image that I had of Shuggie when he takes off his mother’s bra to care for her because she can’t care for herself, and he’s looking at her back, at the lines left in the flesh, and rubbing them and hoping they would lift. As if he could erase them, he could take away some of her pain.
JS Hilary Robinson, my theory tutor for my dissertation, had written an essay where she said: “A body is not a neutral ground of meaning but a copper plate to be etched.”
DS Those paintings were helpful in slowing me down. They ask us to observe closely. They challenged me to write about bodies in a similar way, and it’s essential because the body is a very political thing. It’s often the only thing that my characters have: their bodies are shaped by what they do, and their lives are shaped by how they use their bodies to survive.
JS There’s a lot of attention concentrated on our bodies. You see that shift in the high street, the way the shops change over the years: you used to have a post office, a stationer’s, a butcher; now many have transitioned to nail bars, tanning salons, tattoo parlours.
DS I was at a university a couple of weeks ago to do a reading of Shuggie Bain. It’s only five years old but I can’t yet look back on him with fondness. All I wanted to do was rewrite the book. I wished I had a red pen. Do you look back with kindness? With fondness?
JS Fondness sometimes, or I find my fearless naivety a bit amusing. Often I hear the music that was playing at the time, look at passages of paint and remember making that mark, the size of brush I used, the feeling inside. When I see my paintings I often think: “Oh, that part worked, but maybe I should have put another bridging tone there.” People say: “Oh, that’s a great painting,” and you think: “It’s not as good as it was in my head.”
DS It’s similar with writing: your audience encounters the finished artefact and they don’t see the journey and the loneliness.
JS I wouldn’t call it loneliness. I enjoy making paintings.
DS I find writing very lonely because I worked for 20 years in fashion. Now, writing in contrast to fashion feels incredibly lonely because I sit around and talk to imaginary people all day.
JS Do you have a routine?
DS I find that imaginary people are chattiest in the mornings, so I try to get up at six o’clock and I work till two or three in the afternoon. How about you?
JS I’ve had different working rhythms and routines in my life. Recently I’ve been getting up about 6.30 in the morning and then I’ll paint until I feel that lull, which tends to be around four, and then I might do another session. I like painting eyes first thing in the morning.
DS Why is that?
JS Because my concentration’s at its highest, so I tend to paint details like teeth and eyes first thing in the morning, when I’m sharp.
DS One of the things that speaks to me the most about your work is your journey with colour. It has evolved so much. In the early work I can actually feel Glasgow in the paintings.
JS Glasgow can have beautiful light. My first home there was on Hill Street, and you’d look over toward the flats and mountains and see this silvery light. I’ve never seen it anywhere else quite the same way. Over the last few years I’ve thought much more about nature and light. I’d travel, look at other approaches to painting. I went to Paris and New York and saw how [Willem] de Kooning painted flesh and thought: “What great colours and fluidity.” Then after 11 September and the Iraq war, we were flooded with images that had a lot of intense colour and emotion and I responded to the atmosphere of that time. My work evolved and I started using ranges of red and blue pigments, for example, like in my Stare heads. If you’re curious you experiment, and on that journey you discover possibilities.
DS The same in writing. You’ve got to write through it, to free yourself of it, and then get to the thing that you’ve got no idea that you were heading toward. You’re feeling a character and you’re not quite sure what they’re going to do, so you build this world for them and then you see how they react.
JS It’s been said before, but it’s probably impossible to make the perfect work. I often think: “That’s almost what I meant, that’s got something.” And this moves you forward to the next painting.
DS Truth is essential in writing. And there’s power in writing truths that people would rather leave unsaid – maybe like depicting a body that some might rather not see? I must admit, I was horrified looking back at the journalism around some of your earlier work, and the fact that reviewers would use the word “grotesque” to describe it. Obviously those works haven’t changed, but the world around us keeps shifting, so hopefully reactions have changed as well. Has that journey been interesting to you, or do you not pay attention to it?
JS I just get on with my work. You can’t predict how work will be perceived. And you evolve as well. In the early 90s there were fewer spaces to show, and only a small minority of artists got major platforms. Now art is exhibited from all over the world and different voices are being heard. And then once you’ve been accepted, it’s like, you’ve won the Booker prize, you can’t stay annoyed about that.
DS I felt really overwhelmed by the feeling of being on the outside and nobody knowing me. And then suddenly everybody looked at me like: “Where the hell did you just come from?” There was 15 years of work behind my novels so I hadn’t just arrived, I’d just been quietly over there where no one was paying attention to me. I miss that.
JS It’s important to have time to develop, be playful, use your imagination. I’m often judged on those early degree show works and I’ve developed my painting a lot since then. You have to make the work the way it should be. You can’t make work to appease people who have written a bad review. And if you’re mature about it, the bad review of a new body of work is OK.
DS That’s very big of you. I’m not sure I’m quite there yet. That’s why the world is so nostalgic for the 90s: a time before the internet, for that sense of being by ourselves inside our own lives, without constant commentary and feedback.
I’m fascinated by what Cy Twombly told you once about working: about trying to be ignored for as long as you can in your career, which is so smart.
JS By the time he’d told me that, everybody wanted to know Cy, to show his work and talk to him. And your impulse is to look at that with admiration, but I could see there was a kind of suffering in his words, because you need to concentrate, you need time to play, and that’s probably why he worked in isolated places, so he could focus. You can’t have judgment when you play. You want to be like that child sitting on the floor making a painting when nobody cares: that’s the most precious thing because it’s a space without judgment, and you need to feel that.
DS You’ve got to retreat from the world. But was your early success overwhelming at 22, or did it just feel like permission?
JS Many opportunities happened in a short space of time. I was fortunate to sell my degree show, which was the first time I had enough money to work for a prolonged period. I had this run of wonderful things happen. And as I moved forward I just said to myself: “Get this work right, make this work the best you can.” I stayed quiet and concentrated. And that’s the lesson I learned: that the prize is the journey. Working and enjoying life’s opportunities with family and friends is the prize.
Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, to 7 September, then tours the Modern Art Museum Fort Worth Texas, from 12 October – 18 January 2026. Douglas Stuart’s next novel, John of John, will be published by Picador on 26 May 2026.
