Jenny Sages

Jenny Sages (born 1933 in Shanghai, China) is an Archibald Prize People's Choice Award winning Australian artist. She is known for her abstract landscape paintings and portraits. Her career transformation was greatly influenced by a trip to Kimberley, Western Australia, where she felt enchanted by the local indigenous culture. Her parents were Russian, and she was their only child. During their time in Shanghai, her father sold silk for a living. The family decided to move to Sydney in 1948 due to the political turmoil in China. Sages started attending Sydney Girls High School at 14 and continued to study Design & Colour and Life Drawing at East Sydney Technical College from 1950–51, but she got expelled. She then went to New York and studied at the Franklin School of Art for three-and-a-half years from 1951 to 1954 and graduated in Fine Art, Design and Commercial Art. Sages recalled in an interview with Maria Stoljar in 2017 that she did not acquire any painting skills from art school in New York, but studied fashion illustration instead, which later helped launching her career in the fashion industry.

After her finishing her studies in New York, Sages traveled the Middle East. In 1954, She met her husband Jack Sages in Israel, who was serving the British Navy stationed in Alexandria, Egypt, during World War II. The two later married, returned to Australia and had a daughter Tanya. She also attended John Olsen and Mary White's School in Sydney from 1956–57.

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. She has been working on her art in her private studio located in Double Bay, Sydney since 1985, and regularly held exhibitions in Sydney and Canberra since 1988.

The National Portrait Gallery honoured Sages' unique ability to capture the relationship between the artists and the subject and process of portrait making in her paintings with the exhibition Jenny Sages: Paths to Portraiture in 2010 and 2011, displaying four large-scale portraits and other related materials, artworks, and sketches. The exhibition went on tour in five other locations (Tweed Heads, Toowoomba, Mackay, Burnie and Mosman) with a more expansive collection of Sages' work. Among the National Portrait Gallery's collection, the portraits of artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye, author Helen Garner, and the late ballerina Irina Baronova are permanently on display.

Influence Jenny Sages's portrait of Emily Kame Kngwarrey, Emily Kame Kngwarreye with Lily (1993), was the first work collected by the newly founded National Portrait Gallery in 1998.

Artworks

Material and artistic methods 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. Sages expressed that the process of painting was driven by grief. After 55 years of marriage to Jack Sages, Jenny Sages explores her new identity and new life without him in this self-portrait. The work was completed using the same encaustic painting technique as her other portraits.

Abstract landscape 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." "This painting was done faster than most portraits because I knew him so well and he was sitting on the veranda and I could sneak out and look at him," she explained in an interview.

Jack Sages played a profound role in her artist career and her personal life. 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.

During their visits, Sages completed 37 drawings of the writer, which were the source of elements for the portrait she later completed. 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."

Sages produced the portrait of Helen Garner, True Stories – Helen Garner in 2003, and won the Archibald Prize finalist the same year. The painting was completed with her usual medium, wax-based surface and rubbed-in pigments. Garner said "I immediately felt that it was me," as she first saw her portrait at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. She also appreciates Sages portraying her in less flattering but more realistic aesthetic. "When I looked at the painting I just felt that she had seen me in some quite deep way'." Sages was approached by Portrait Gallery Director Andrew Sayers, who was interested in including the work in his gallery collection; Sage then offered the portrait as a donation to the gallery.

Archibald Prize She has been a finalist for the Archibald Prize at least 20 times.

Year Name of work Comments 1990 Adele Weiss and Benjamin Finalist 1993 Keith Bain (Everyone is Doing the Farandole) Finalist 1994 Loti and Victor Smorgon Finalist 1995 Gene Sherman with Family, After Tillers, After Freud, After Watteau Finalist 1996 Paul Cox Finalist 1997 Greg Weight making a portrait of Tom Bass Finalist 1998 Nobody's daughter – Meme Thorne Finalist 1999 Meryl Tankard Finalist 2000 Each morning when I wake up I put on my mother's face Finalist 2001 My Love Highly Commended 2001 Jackie and Kerryn Finalist 2002 Ros and Joe Finalist 2003 True Stories – Helen Garner Finalist 2004 Seeing the lights – Anthony Hopkins artist Finalist 2005 Gloria Tamere Petyarre Finalist ? People's Choice award 2006 Hossein Valamanesh Finalist 2007 Irina Baronova (handing on the baton) Finalist 2008 Anita and Luca Finalist 2009 Heidi & Sarah-Jane 'parallel lives' Finalist 2011 My Jack Finalist 2012 After Jack (Self Portrait) Finalist People's Choice award

She has also been the hung in the Archibald as the subject of the work of Jiawei Shen's 2002 Finalist's work The lady from Shanghai (Jenny Sages) She received a highly commended in the Wynne Prize in 1999 with The Leichhardt. She won the Wynne Prize in 2005.

Sages was one of five artists featured in the award winning documentary film, Two Thirds Sky – Artists in Desert Country, directed by Sean O'Brien in 2002.

She was interviewed in the 2005 Peter Berner documentary Loaded Brush.

Sages is the subject of the documentary Paths to Portraiture by filmmaker Catherine Hunter. For the 2011 Archibald Prize, Jenny painted Jack Sages her husband and companion of 55 years. The painting was accepted but Jack died before the exhibition opened. In 2012 Sages turned her gaze inward in an attempt to capture her grief. Hunter was with the artist as she dealt with her husband's death and then the 2012 Archibald Prize success.