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Hunt Slonem
© Photo by Barbel Miebach


Cockatoos 2004
30x40 inches


Javas, 2004
37x37 inches


DSC01854
50x98 inches		   "My Painting is a life long obsession and daily ritual of capturing images from my environment and spirituality. I try to convey meaning in paint, concerning the glory of nature, with its myriad of exotic form and color, and a mystical essence as I live surrounded by this world I have created; At once present and coming from the higher realms."

Hunt Slonem was born in Kittery, Maine in 1951. Exhibited globally, the American artist lives and works in New York City. One of his two legendary lofts houses an aviary for his 70 exotic birds and has been featured many times in articles and on television. His fascination with exotica imprinted during his childhood in Hawaii and experience as a foreign exchange student in Managua, Nicaragua. Slonem received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Tulane University of Louisiana and studied painting at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Since 1977, Slonem soloed in over 250 exhibitions at prestigious galleries. His work is exhibited globally, including in Madras, Quito, Venice, Gustavia, San Juan, Guatemala City, Paris, Amsterdam, Madrid, Stockholm, Oslo, Cologne, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. Over 70 museums internationally include his work in their collections, among them The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC. His work has been shown in 31 different museums. He won the 1991 National Endowment for the Arts Grant in Painting, and MacDowell Fellowships in 1986, 1984 and 1983. Hunt Slonem is represented by the Marlborough Gallery in New York, New York.

Since 1973, Slonem has lived and worked in New York City in his legendary loft with his seventy pet birds. The birds are his models. So enmeshed and unique are his aviary, studio, lifestyle and painting, that Slonem has been featured on television a dozen times and in numerous articles. In his 1993 essay, the late Henry Geldzahler describes, "The visual field of Hunt Slonem's paintings is a continuum accented by ovals of varying shape and colors that it turns out are birds." The birds evolved from Slonem's early paintings of saints as well as inspiration from the pioneers of bird imagery in painting, including Fabritsius, Heade and Audubon. Audubon shot one hundred birds for each painting. Slonem is instead a slave to his birds. He spends the first two hours a day caring for them; the rest of the day painting them.

Slonem's birds symbolize the soul and spiritual liberation. Repeated trips to India have nurtured the artist's spirituality. His work depicts his reverence for exotic life forms. Birds are one of the great treasures of the earth that sixty million years of uninterrupted evolution have created in the rain forest. Many are now extinct because of man's astonishing destruction. Slonem's images are a plea to the viewer to look at these creatures before they disappear from the planet. Poet and critic John Ashbery observes, "From the narrow confines of his grids, half cage, half perch, Slonem summons dazzling explosions of the variable life around us that needs only to be looked at in order to spring into being."

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