Born in 1928 in Charleston, West Virginia, Savage attended West Virginia University for two years and then moved to New York City where he attended the Pratt Institute and The Art Students League. Later, he was the Art Director for a publishing firm and then an advertising firm in New York. In 1961 he moved his family to England for a year where he painted full-time. In the same year he had his first solo exhibition, from which Joseph Hirshhorn bought 13 pieces.
On his return to the United States a year later he began to receive recognition for his work and was featured alongside Andy Warhol, Andrew Wyeth, Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg in a 1963 CBS documentary entitled New American Painters. Back in New York, he became partner in Elektra Films and the following year, founded his own film production company, Savage-Friedman Inc. with Harold Friedman. He wrote, produced and directed several films between 1964 and 1971, when he retired from the company to work independently in film and animation. His strongest work was made from the 1970’s onward as he began to concentrate more on his painting. He participated in numerous group exhibits and had many solo shows, including a large retrospective of his work in 1994 at Sunrise Museum in Charleston, WV.
Savage’s style is hard to categorize and does not fall into any one movement of the 20th century. His work is often characterized by a fluid use of line and a vibrating energy; his subjects positively tremble. Perhaps this relates to his extensive experience working in film and animation. The organic, heavily worked forms and particularly the faces of the figures in his paintings seem so alive that one almost expects them to become animated. He made no effort to disguise the fact that many of his quirky portraits of writers and artists were taken from photographs, a common practice among artists in the second half of the twentieth century.
Stylistically, Savage’s work is most closely allied to realism, and yet in works such as Three Graces there is a clear abstraction of shape, color and form. Similarly, the unfinished quality in Grandma detracts from the realism of the image, suggesting that accurate representation of his subjects was not something of key importance to the artist. It seems that Savage was as comfortable with a degree of abstraction in his work, as he was with a highly representational approach. There is a stylized quality to all of Savage’s figures. He has been described as a “romantic realist.”
