Jennifer Anne Saville (born 7 May 1970) is a contemporary British painter and an original member of the Young British Artists. Saville works and lives in Oxford, England and she is known for her large-scale painted depictions of nude women. Saville has been credited with originating a new and challenging method of painting the female nude and reinventing figure painting for contemporary art. Some paintings are of small dimensions, while other are of much larger scale. Monumental subjects come from pathology textbooks that she has studied that informed her on injury to bruise, burns, and deformity. John Gray commented: "As I see it, Jenny Saville's work expresses a parallel project of reclaiming the body from personality. Saville worked with many models who under went cosmetic surgery to reshape a portion of their body. In doing that, she captures "marks of personality for the flesh" and together embraces how we can be the writers of our own lives." Early life and education Saville was born in Cambridge, England. Saville went to the Lilley and Stone School (now The Newark Academy) in Newark, Nottinghamshire, for her secondary education, later gaining her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Glasgow School of Art (1988–1992). She was then awarded a six-month scholarship to the University of Cincinnati where she enrolled in a course in women's studies. Saville was exposed to gender political ideas and renowned feminist writers. During her time in Cincinnati, she saw a lot of big women in shorts and t-shirts. This was the kind of physicality that she found herself interested in. She partially credits her interest in big bodies to Pablo Picasso, an artist that she sees as a painter that made his subjects solid and permanent. Career At the end of Saville's undergraduate education, the leading British art collector, Charles Saatchi, saw her work at Clare Henry's Critics Choice exhibition at the Cooling Gallery in Cork St and purchased a painting. Her first series of paintings consisted of large scale portraits of Saville and other models. He offered the artist an 18-month contract, supporting her while she created new works to be exhibited in the Saatchi Gallery in London. The collection, Young British Artists III, exhibited in 1994 with Saville's self-portrait, Plan (1993), as the signature piece. Rising quickly to critical and public recognition and emerging as part of the Young British Artists (YBA) scene, Saville has been noted for