Pregnancy was clearly has an impact on Jenny Saville, according to Kelly Crow in Wall Street Journal. The Gagosian-stable artist is having a show open this week focusing on her and others’s experience of motherhood:

Doctors forbade her from painting with bluish-white cadmium or other potentially toxic paints. As her belly grew, she had to climb the ladder in her studio more slowly; she also had to use longer paintbrushes that offered greater reach. And the moment her son was born, she had to begin painting between his naps rather than round-the-clock.

Yet for a painter obsessed with the terrain of the human body, pregnancy also kindled ideas about how a woman looks when she is “at human capacity,” she said. […]

Ms. Saville sketched and painted herself throughout her two pregnancies, but she also asked at least 10 pregnant friends to model for her as she worked on the series. She said the women were more willing to pose nude pregnant than they would be before or afterward. The reason, she said, was that pregnancy is the one time in a woman’s life when it’s socially acceptable to be rotund. She added, “Within that space, they don’t need to look like anyone else.”

Pregnancy Expands a Vision (Wall Street Journal)