Jenny Sages
Jenny Sages (born 1933 in Shanghai, China) is an Archibald Prize People's Choice Award winning Australian artist.
After being expelled from East Sydney Technical College, Jenny moved to New York to study at Franklin School of Art.
[2] Her career transformation was greatly influenced by a trip to Kimberley, Western Australia, where she felt enchanted by the local indigenous culture.
In 1954, She met her husband Jack Sages in Israel, who was serving the British Navy stationed in Alexandria, Egypt, during World War II.
[1] After returning to Australia, Sages worked as a freelance fashion illustrator and travel blogger from 1955 to 1984 for various books and magazines, including Vogue.
[3] For 20 years, she frequently visited Aboriginal communities in central Australia and Darwin with a group of female artists in search of inspirations of her landscape paintings and portraits.
[9][11] The exhibition went on tour in five other locations (Tweed Heads, Toowoomba, Mackay, Burnie and Mosman) with a more expansive collection of Sages’ work.
[14] Sages was one of the pioneering artists in Australia to apply the encaustic method to her paintings, as she was inspired by the Fayum portraits of Ancient Egypt.
According to journalist Elizabeth Wilson’s observations in 2011, Sages spends a great amount of time on preparatory work, from making markings on the boards to rubbing the incisions with oil and pigment, taking her weeks to finish a single piece.
Sages creates her work using kitchen knives scraping into the surface of the boards, forming indentations for pigments to settle.
[16] Despite Sages sourcing her inspiration through observing indigenous art-making, her representation of the central Australian landscape does not include Aboriginal icons, techniques, and forms, but stimulated by her own senses and memories of the land.
Curator Margot Osborne observed that Sages “approach to abstraction is not imitative of Aboriginal art, but there are affinities evident in her repetitive organic rhythms and textures and also in the underlying allusions to nature as a wellspring of spiritual understanding.”[4] Sages landscape paintings feature the tactile and rhythmic patterns that resembles elements from nature, such as leaf skeletons, maggots, seeds, or weathered wood and fossilized tracks.
The painting I am not as stupid as you think I am created in 2009 with the topic written repetitively in the work reflects the educational values of punishment in Sages’ generation, as it declares a self-asserting sentiment as a student, an artist, or a woman.
The work Ecclesiastes, or The Preacher (2011), densely filled with words from the Bible, demonstrates her patience and techniques as an artist.
Sages said in interviews that her husband’s frequent participation in her preparatory work and provided care and moral support while she pursued her artist career.
[18] Sages' friendship with the Aboriginal artist started when she visited her in the Northern Territory, where Emily Kame Kngwarreye's community is.
[9] Alongside Sages large scale portrait painting of Knwarreye, the National Gallery Museum collected a series of sketches recording the casual conversations between the two artists.
Art historian Sarah Engledow commented on the drawings now under the National Portrait Gallery’s collection, “though they are 'preparatory' works these paintings are good examples of Sages' skill at capturing the light of varying times of day.”[21] Sages produced the portrait of Helen Garner, True Stories – Helen Garner in 2003, and won the Archibald Prize finalist the same year.
Grenville described in an interview with the National Portrait Gallery that her connection with Sages was built on their resonating creative process, as both of them let their materials guide them on the journey of creation.
