For this week’s blog post, I chose to transform Nan Goldin’s 1984 “Nan One Month After Being Battered” into a mural commissioned by Jenny Saville. To transform Goldin’s photograph, I believe Saville would, in typical fashion, use thick layers of oil paint to represent Goldin’s flesh. I chose to commission Saville for this piece because of her painting, “Rosetta II,” because it becomes a deeply distressing representation of a blind woman through her scraped and smeared brushstrokes as well as her use of cool tones that I believe would add poignancy to a painted depiction of Goldin’s work. Due to Saville’s focus on flesh, she would focus most closely on the bruising beneath Goldin’s left eye. By using cool tones throughout the majority of the work, moreover, Saville’s use of red in depicting Goldin’s right eye would become extremely harsh. I would like the mural to overwhelmingly consume the viewer, so that he or she is forced to confront domestic violence.
Nan Goldin, “One Month After Being Battered,” 1984
I could definitely imagine this image as a Saville painting. I wonder if her signature style of turning the human body into flesh would become controversial given the subject matter of the image.
I feel like your choice of Saville as the artist you’d commission makes a lot of sense for this photograph. I feel like this differs from Seville’s painting in the staging — the use of dark red lipstick and glossy hair paired with a pearl necklace suggests a level of embellishment uncommon for Saville’s compositions. It would be interesting to apply her figurative style to an image like this one.