"The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa of Avila"

"The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa of Avila"

Kerry Wright, 1984

Oils on canvas

120cm x 90cm (4ft x 3ft)

Bernini’s sculpture, “The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa”, first came to my attention when I was studying art history many years ago. It inspired this painting. Saint Teresa of Avila was a mother abbess of the esoteric, cloistered, Carmelite Order of the Roman Catholic Church in mediaeval Spain. Not to be confused with the sweetly angelic French Carmelite nun, Saint Therese of Lisieux, widely venerated as “The Little Flower”. Saint Teresa of Avila was most certainly nobody’s little flower. She was a doctor of the Church and a great reformer. A most formidable woman, indeed. The story goes that Saint Teresa was praying in chapel one day when an angel of the Lord appeared before her, bearing a heavenly arrow. The angel thrust the arrow into her breast, which she experienced as an ecstatic, overpoweringly euphoric sensation of divine love. Bernini graphically captured the moment of Teresa’s rapturous penetration in his sculpture. I found the concept of a celibate nun being penetrated to be quite quizzical, be it by a divine arrow or otherwise. It all appeared just a tiny tad less than spiritual to me. And I wondered about the expression Bernini had chosen to portray on Saint Teresa’s face. Is it soaring religious ecstasy we see or simply base carnal release? Being unsure, I decided to paint my own version, in order to allow the creative process to take me where it would. In my painting, the angel has been transmogrified into a contorted, gyrating beam of light, which embraces the saint and holds her close. Her protruding, reptilian tongue and disturbingly confronting nudity emerge from the canvas as abject manifestations of her submission before the Divinity. Bernini depicted Teresa panting, her mouth gaping wide and head lolling sensuously backwards. I took that one step further and portrayed her shrieking and salivating.