SUSIE HAMILTON
Susie Hamilton is a British painter who lives and works in London. She is a graduate of both St. Martin’s School of Art and Byam Shaw School of Art and has a PhD in English Literature from London University.
‘I paint figures in a wilderness she says. This may be natural wilderness, a tropical forest or an ice-field, or it may be a bleak public space such as superstore, casino, hospital, banqueting hall or shopping mall. I like painting animals because they express a joyousness and a world of dynamism.’ The animals she paints are semi concealed – hidden in their sequestered world. A bird sits puffed up on a branch Set in difficult and exacting places, the figures are also made more vulnerable by my ˜iconoclastic” method of painting which seeks to deface or undo them.’
‘I work quite fast; I can use washes and layers or even buckets of colour. I blow some sections with a hairdryer and other areas have a fluidity and precision. I use the mutable and unpredictable nature of paint to create people or animals who are similarly in flux. They are assaulted by marks and blots, dissolve into acrylic fluidity or turn into nameless shapes so that both figure and figurative representation are destabilised and transformed. Metamorphosis, central to all my work, includes metamorphosis into abstraction through which an identifiable image is turned into something unnamed and mysterious.’
