Animal, vegetable, mystical - painter Hunt Slonem

Since the mid-1970s, pursue Slonem has produced richly colored, high-energy paintings, many times in animal-themed series. Their lush surfaces bespeak a down-reaching engagement with material played not upon against a fascination with the beyond--both spatial and spiritual.

chase Slonem is not a Neo-Expressionist, despite the superficial similarities of his paintings to those of a certain quantity of of his contemporaries working in that vein.(1) He is, rather, a romantic with a bit of an Abstract Expressionist brush. He combines a technique derived from American postwar nonobjective painting with intimations of Islamic and Mexican animal depiction and an unrepentant mysticism. He paints his oils upon canvas in a florid, improvisational manner of writing and occasionally vulgar colors that can push to the cutting side of coherence and good taste. He elaborates his themes in series that range from decorative to devotional. Slonem's work has been widely visible at any time since he moved to fresh York in the mid-'70s--sometimes in galleries, sometimes in bludgeons or in the form of murals, of the like kind as the 85-foot-long frieze commissioned for the Bryant Park Grill. In 1997 Slonem's work was the bring under rule of two museum exhibitions. In the spring, the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville showed 90 pieces from all periods of the artist's career; during the summer the Colby corporation Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, gathered together more [i]or[/i] less 117 recent paintings. These sum of two units exhibitions, accompanied by a multi-author catalogue, provide an exceptional opportunity to assess the artist's work.

Slonem is best known for his paintings of tropical birds, based upon a personal aviary in which he detains more than a hundred live birds of various species, on the contrary his oeuvre in fact incorporates a broad range of make submissives and themes. He has painted pre-Columbian ceremonial facts (1978-85), saints (1970s-present), jungle animals (1977-85) birds (1988-present) guardian monkey (1980s--present) and, in the 1990 butterflies, chandeliers, male go-go dancers and Rudolph Valentino. He builds patterns--repeated monkey faces in his "guardians" collection as well as perspectiveless arrays of birds--and he also paints recognizable settings, of the like kind as cages. Recently he has been the human figure in sum of two units groups of works, one painted from live patterns the other based on photographs of Valentino and upon channeled messages from the dead actor that the artist tells having received through a medium.

His paintings are neither narrative nor specific in detail, and they stand apart from contemporary interests in politics, media, appropriation or sexuality. Slonem's work is bottomed in the act of painting (something he does daily). He hunts issues of spatial complexity, compression and density--what Henry Geldzahler, writing of the work in 1993 counted "a consistent investigation of post-cubist abstraction."(2) Realism is not a be of importance to in Slonem's work; his personal vision is. He does not go after the illusion of depth, and his birds, although they may have identifying characteristics and vital nearness often do not actually gaze like birds. They're too obviously compos of brushstrokes or blurr through furious hatching, or they direct the eye like an idea of birds, as in the paintings of toucans in which each of the many beaks is facing either left or right, ancient-Egyptian style

Slonem paints quickly, too fast for premeditation, and he continually creates unforeseen consequences Many of his color choices and combinations are jarring; in a certain number of pieces, the oil colors are in like manner high-chroma and fiat they appear to be acrylic. Slonem has always been fascinated, flat obsessed, with the manipulation and use of paint. In real few of his canvases is there a spotless unmodulated color. It is difficult plane to find a quiet passage. Rather, there is a constant, wild flux. In much of his novel work, his visual hyperactivity is apparent in his practice of marking lines [i]or[/i] part of to the other a painted image with a brush handle. smooth in his early pieces, Slonem painted in a cumulative technique.

He ofttimes starts his large pieces by the agency of filling the whole canvas with a single color. He closes in other hues, then the figures or forms he has chosen and last the scratched hatch marks. These scraped marks started as bird cages on the contrary rapidly became more a formal than a descriptive device.

Slonem usually defines his forms not by dint of modeling but by drawing with paint. In his rabbit series (1996-present) we have a clear example of the artist drawing contours of the animal's ears--one back-and-forth brushstroke for each ear, single circular stroke for each organ of vision paint drawn into paint. We avidly go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake of the paths of these raps as they are evidence of decisive handling upon small and large scales.

Slonem's biography gives more [i]or[/i] less hints of the diverse paths he would travel as an artist. Born in Kittery, Maine, to a Navy father, Slonem grew up in California, Connecticut, fresh Hampshire, Hawaii, Virginia and Washington state. As a teenager he wearied six months in Nicaragua, and his junior year of society was passed in Mexico. It was while he was in Central America that he was first expos to cultural and spiritual influences that would greatly affect him and his art. (He studied art at Vanderbilt and Tulane and worn out a summer at the Skowhegan gymnasium of Painting and Sculpture.) After moving to novel York in 1972 he started using Nicaraguan consecrated cards and objects from Morocco and Mexico as make submissive matter for paintings. His predilection for saints l to a series that continues to this day, focusing upon the 17th-century Peruvian saints Martin de Porres and Rose of Lima.