Jenny Saville

I’ve mixed colors, painted and drawn with many lines of Rilke’s poetry circulating in my head — lines like, “and there were even bits of eternity in my intestines,” from “The Song of the Suicide.” I’ve made several bodies of work in recent years thinking about visualizing the line, “And one sees to the bottom of time.” Rilke’s “The Book of Images” and “Duino Elegies” are great companions. It’s the visceral, intense and mysterious quality to his words that hang in the air around my studio. “To work is to live without dying” was Rilke’s motto.