Douglas Stuart credits Jenny Saville’s visceral paintings for igniting the spark that gave birth to Shuggie Bain and shaped his visual storytelling

17 August 2025

Body of work. Jenny Saville. Photograph: Tyler Mitchell

Renowned novelist Douglas Stuart, best known for his Booker Prize winning debut Shuggie Bain, recently sat down with trailblazing painter Jenny Saville to explore how her fearless artistry influenced both his creative journey and broader visions of human expression. The two met in Saville’s Oxford studio to reflect on their unique paths hers in the world's elite art circles, his in literary acclaim sparked by a fateful encounter decades ago when Stuart was only sixteen.

His reaction that summer at Glasgow School of Art’s degree show was instantaneous and raw. He described standing before Saville’s Propped and experiencing a life-altering jolt: “In that one moment your work changed the course of my entire life.” That painting, as he now sees it, captured the fragile vulnerability and layered emotions that Stuart was still learning to articulate in words.

For Saville, revisiting those early works focuses attention on process as much as image. Stuart mused that Saville’s paintings hold multiple narratives not just the emotional subjects rendered on them, but the story embedded in brushstroke and decision. He likened his own writing to painting in prose trying to conjure worlds vivid enough to feel tangible to his readers.

Saville shared how she first recognized her calling. Even as a child, she made art relentlessly. Her creative permission came from her upbringing both parents were teachers who encouraged her experimentation and observation. She recalled saving up during her art school years to dedicate herself fully to painting. Stuart mused what his younger self would make of her career now. Saville smiled: her 20s were electric and formative, a time when she finally had space to experiment and grow.

They also spoke of Trace, Saville’s haunting canvas from 1993-94, one Stuart returned to when penning Shuggie Bain. He said that image became his mental portrait of the young Shuggie, caring for his struggling mother. The raw intensity in the paint the way the skin is marked, as if attempting to erase memory and pain underlined the emotional landscape Stuart was charting in his prose.

Saville’s works don’t just represent bodies, they interrogate them. Curator Sarah Howgate noted that Saville pushes paint so far it becomes flesh. Her large-scale canvases slip from vivid figuration into abstraction raw surfaces and distorted forms collapsing into something more elemental. Her art transcends portraiture, capturing not just faces but the weight of being.

This exhibition, Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting, now at London’s National Portrait Gallery, is her first major UK museum show. It offers a rare chance to witness her monumental paintwork in full force a collision of raw humanity and painterly virtuosity. Saville herself resists labeling her pieces as portraits and prefers to think of them as portraits of painting.

Stuart’s gratitude for Saville’s influence goes beyond admiration. In his creative arc from a shyly brilliant teenager to an internationally celebrated author he traces his ability to render interior worlds back to the visceral territory explored in her art. His work, he says, has always been a journey of interpreting emotional logic through narrative much like Saville’s exploration of flesh through paint.

Together, their conversation is a manifesto on cross-medium kinship between word and pigment on how painting can feed storytelling and fiction can carry the weight of a brushstroke. Saville’s retrospective in London doesn’t just celebrate her legacy it marks a moment of reciprocal recognition, when an artist and a writer acknowledge the visual poetry each has conjured with uncanny realism.