Susie Hamilton
My work starts with drawing from life. I observe from the sidelines, scrutinising tourists, shoppers, holidaymakers, diners, hen nights and other scenes of leisure. I have to work quickly to try to catch particular poses and this means that figures are abbreviated and simplified and also morph into something misshapen and grotesque. This is a quality that I like because it says something about human vulnerability and about the pathos of those who process or trudge or consume or travel in the quest for meaning or excitement.
Going towards the grotesque is also going towards the unfamiliar and I like to transform my figures into peculiar hybrid things or into blots, messes and abstract shapes. I am a representational painter but the representational overtaken by abstraction is important, partly because it is a way of challenging our identity but also because it is a way of reaching a point where the recognisable gives way to the unnamed. It dramatises and contrasts two ways of seeing – through names or through nameless shapes. I want something that starts as a spectacle of everyday life–the street, the mall or the beach–to end in a painting of something uncanny or mysterious.
Going towards the grotesque is also going towards the unfamiliar and I like to transform my figures into peculiar hybrid things or into blots, messes and abstract shapes. I am a representational painter but the representational overtaken by abstraction is important, partly because it is a way of challenging our identity but also because it is a way of reaching a point where the recognisable gives way to the unnamed. It dramatises and contrasts two ways of seeing – through names or through nameless shapes. I want something that starts as a spectacle of everyday life–the street, the mall or the beach–to end in a painting of something uncanny or mysterious.
