BUNNIES By Hunt Slonem,
published by Glitterati Incorporated
Foreword by John Berendt, Essay by Bruce Helander
Exciting, unexpected, realistic, impressionistic, abstract—the bunny paintings of celebrated artist Hunt Slonem have something for everyone. Every morning Slonem awakes and performs what he calls his “daily warm-ups.” Within the course of half-an-hour, the artist paints rabbits on a series of small rectangular panels made of wood and Masonite, each work a post-expressionist narrative gesture of the artist in his element. John Berendt describes the process as, “…the artistic equivalent of calisthenics in which he flexes his painting apparatus to establish control over the colors, shapes and textures that flow from his mind’s eye through his arm, hand and brush on the painted surface.”
Slonem’s paintings as a collection appear here for the first time in Bunnies, a treasury of enchanting paintings that are at once pop culture and fine art, in four-color and black-and-white. As Bruce Helander writes in the introduction to the book, “Perhaps it was the rabbits that inhabited his childhood yard in Kittery, Maine that made an indelible impression on the artist and now manifests itself in his illustrious career…. The use of a bunny as a subject has a distinct and delightful charm of its own. Slonem takes a cue from a bunny’s soft and independent character, usually one at a time in a portrait that convincingly accommodates tall, unruly ears and some long whiskers to boot. His are a line-up of fuzzy likenesses that are created quickly and forcefully with a clear sense of compassion and precision even though they are purposely abstract.”
Hunt Slonem is the internationally recognized American painter, sculptor, and printmaker. His work has been exhibited in more than 350 galleries and museums worldwide, and is represented in over 100 museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim and The Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York City. He exhibits regularly at both public and private venues around the world, and has received numerous honors and awards, including a MacDowell Fellowship and National Endowment for the Arts grant. He lives in New York City and Louisiana, where he has notably restored two important plantations to their original states. John Berendt is an American author, known for writing the best-selling non-fiction book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which was a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction. He lives in New York City. Bruce Helander is an American artist whose specialty is collage and assemblage as well as a well-known curator, art critic, editor, national juror, and writer. He has a master’s degree in painting from the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, where he later became the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs of the college. He is a fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts. Helander arrived in Palm Beach in 1982 from New York City, where he published Art Express magazine and where he now resides.Hardcover, 11×14 inches, 256 pages, 250 four-color illustrations, ISBN: 978-0-9891704-5-1
For further information, please contact Sara Rosen, srosen@glitteratiincorporated.com
Leave a Reply