Susie Hamilton : Ecstasy

In the life drawing class at St Martin's in 1969 we had a model who played a witch in Polanski's 'Macbeth'.  She was the one we most enjoyed drawing because her shapes and contours were lavish and excessive.  Her flesh spread and rolled and fell in exciting and surprising ways as she sat on a stool or bent forward over the mattress.  She also had a strong, assertive, sometimes menacing presence. 

Years later on the beach at Berck-sur-Mer I noticed similar women and started drawing and painting them as they sunbathed.  I was captivated by their shapes and the way the light fell on them casting shadows.  I was also drawn to their strength, defiance and authority.  They became part of my 2004 series of ‘Beach’ paintings.

My paintings of the women do not however have the ghostly mournfulness of the ‘Mutilates’, their mutation is more Bacchanalian.  They were influenced both by descriptions of the Maenads in Ovid’s account of the Bacchanalia in 'Metamorphoses' and also by one of my favourite artists, Cy Twombly.  In his Dionysian/Bacchanalian works, swipes and smears and gashes cancel rectangular and orderly forms to express uninhibited life and energy.  Scribbling and erasure destroy settled shapes and any idea of completeness in this restless, wild sweep that conveys the idea of continuous process.

'Ecstasy' is connected to this since its Greek origin, ekstasis, means 'outside of oneself'.  My figures are ‘going outside themselves’, because of their sexual poses and expressions and also because they are painted in a way that, as Shakespeare said of Antony's passion for Cleopatra, 'o'erflows the measure'.   They are made with messy, liquid, streaming paint and with the addition of blots, blooms, stains and dribbles.  For me the use of mess is an ecstatic method of painting.  Just as the ecstatic figure is extended and dissolved in frenzy or delight, this use of mess disrupts, dissolves and overthrows calm and finished images. It suggests liberation and possibility with its joyful riot of defacement.