DIRTY SEX SUITS
- maecrawford
- Sep 18
- 2 min read
Hamlet, our favorite depressed prince of Denmark, has a wonderful line in Act 4, Scene 3, about death and worms — that no matter who you are, death is how it ends for all of us. The beautiful and the hideous, the rich and the poor, we all become worm food: “your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service — two dishes, but to one table.”
I was never depressed. And I’m certainly not a Shakespearean scholar. But I have been fascinated by this perspective on death ever since I was young, just as I am intrigued by the idea that who we are is inside of us, that our bodies, as Hamlet implies, are just temporary cases for our soul or spirit.
I wanted to create a series of paintings that capture that view of death, putting a focus not on our beautiful human bodies but on the soul and spirit inside of them.
I decided to take the bodies of the most beautiful models — those that would one day become worm food, just like the rest of us — and portray their skin as simply clothes, a high-profile designer’s new fashion that, no matter how beautiful or glamorous, would still need to be unzipped and tossed aside at the end of life.
What would be revealed after each model unzipped — their soul, their true identity — would need to be portrayed as more gleaming, more glamorous, more beautiful than their naked bodies.
I gave the six figures in the series the names of famous designers (Vera, Armani, Ralph, Tommy, Coco, and Calvin) and gave them bodies that, while naked and traditionally beautiful, were also cast in dark, dank gray, silver, and black. While dying and cast in shadow, each figure would be unzipping their skin, a final act before shuffling off this mortal coil.
Their souls, their true selves, I would paint as spraying upwards, out of their bodies, in a stream of gleaming yellow with ornate, flowery designs, a vibrant contrast from their dark and shadowed bodies.
To get the beautiful bodies just right, I used photos I found on the internet of naked supermodels.
To capture their vibrant spray of soul, I applied gold leaf, a thin sheet of imitation gold that adds a radiant metallic accent to yellow.
To give that soul yellow its full impact, I went big with the canvases, some as big as 4’ tall.
Visit www.melissamaekors.com or email me at melissamae@melissamaekors.com
to commission a painting or to let me know which paintings you want to hear about in my next eblast.
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