There is a quite incredible sensation upon stumbling onto something of distinction at the right time in one’s life to appreciate it. Had I read Moby Dick or John Kennedy Toole’s masterpiece Confederacy of Dunces before the age of 40, they wouldn’t have had the same impact. 

I first became aware of Hunt Slonem in 2018 through an Architectural Digest article on his restoration of his Castle in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Slonem was already a household name by this time, having established himself in the art world since the late 1970s when he was 24. Today his works are housed in over 250 museums worldwide, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and the Whitney. 

I remember finding him quite fascinating, he had all those birds, and his art grabbed your attention the way only significant art can. 

His rabbits are small works, placed in ornate picture frames, appear simple, like doodles, but then you look at them and see the rabbits’ personality. The frame, which isn’t a frame anyone would think to use for a small piece, somehow works, especially when you fill a wall with a dozen or so rabbit pictures as Slonem designed them to be shown and bought. It reminds me of an old Warner Brothers cartoon where Mr. Rabbit has a wall of pictures of his 50 or so children all in different frames and not evenly hung on the wall. 

Each weekday morning, after breakfast and coffee he is in his downtown Brooklyn studio. Before Slonem does anything, before he checks his email or talks with anyone, he paints these 8×10 rabbits. He paints them to clear his head, to get his creativity flowing before he moves on to tackling many of his other works, something he has done since the early ’80s.

His paintings start off at $6,000 and upwards of $175,000.

Slonem’s paintings have changed over the decades. He has moved into different explorations. But his exotic vision of what he wants of his art hasn’t changed. 

A few days before Christmas, 2021, Slonem called me. I had set up the interview with his press agent a few days before. I had a dozen or so questions written up that I seldom follow but keep me on track. I prefer the interview to be candid and spontaneous and let it go naturally to wherever it takes us. These kinds of interviews are the best. Not just for myself and the interviewee, since they aren’t forced to answer the same questions repeatedly, but to the reader who hopefully gets a better insight into this person. 

While doing my research, I discovered Slonem to be a thinker and holds a fantastic wealth of information. He grew up the son of a Naval Officer, constantly moved around as a kid, living a few years in Hawaii. At 16, he was an exchange student in Nicaragua. He spent six months as a sophomore undergraduate at the University of the Americas in San Andrés Cholula, Puebla, Mexico, eventually graduating with a Painting and Art History degree from Tulane University. 

He’s been around the proverbial block more than a few times, has traveled the world, met some of the most influential people in the late 20th and early 21st Century, buys and refurbishes historic 1800s homes, estates, plantations, and castles, collects gothic furniture, top hats and art. Among his numerous charitable contributions is his working with Lee Jofa designing wallpaper of his famous bunnies for the Ronald McDonald House in Long Island.

This isn’t good. Not at all because I only have 20 minutes and about 2500 words. I decided I needed to focus on one aspect, have a singular thread run through the interview to keep it from being too filled with facts and no personality. But, being too focused limits insight into the man as a whole.

In the end, I decided just to let him talk. I peppered him with questions and let him tell as much or little about a subject, to ebb and flow between ideas and thoughts, and I listened (something I’m not very good at, but I’m getting better) as he talked about his becoming an artist, his love of birds and gothic furniture.

Note to the reader: There is so much more about Slonem’s art, history, accomplishments that I didn’t even scratch upon in this interview. So I highly recommend reading two books if you get the opportunity. The Worlds of Hunt Slonem by Dominique Nahas, and Hunt Slonem: The Bigger Picture by Ted Vassilev. It’ll be well worth your time.

The Interview

RRM: You had your first solo show in ’77 when you were 24, and from there, your art career took off. Besides creating great art, what do you attribute most to your acceptance into top museums and art galleries at such a young age?

HS: Persistance, perservierence, prayer. I guess something I do resonates with people. I’m not an egomaniac. I don’t think I’m the best artist in the world. 

RRM: What inspires your creativity? 

HS: Moving to New York in 1973 was a very profound experience, and I’m amazed I had the courage to do it and the strength to survive. It was enormously exciting, the wealth of experience, and all the people I’ve met over the 40 whatever years I’ve lived in New York. The shows I’ve seen. It cannot help but rub off on you. I’ve met everybody from the Dalai Lama to you name it. New York has such a range of experience. Fashion has significantly impacted my art, with color and form. And I’ve lived with nature. I’ve had as many as 200 birds at one time. I’ve had to reel it in a little bit, so now I’m down to eight. It’s just too much work keeping up with the birds. But I’ve learned so much from it.

RRM: Although you live in New York and have for almost 50 years, you remain true to your early fascination with things excitingly different or unusual. How did you make it in New York at such a young age?

HS: I stuck to my vision and my art’s vision. From the beginning, this was of utmost importance to me, the only way I could survive. It still is. That’s important. You must have your inner vision and be true to yourself. 

I think there’s a part of my work that people recognize as something that resonates in them because of its devotion to nature, and I have this thing with repetition. 

I’m not shifting styles every five minutes to fit in or make some statement. I am profoundly guided in what I do. I feel a lot of my work is channeled into me. 

A lot of my ideas come out of spirituality. 

RRM: William Wordsworth wrote, “The child is father of the man,” meaning things we experience in our youth transcend into adulthood. How has your childhood played a part in the man you became?

HS: I grew up a bit in Hawaii as a kid. I grew orchids, had birds, and was mesmerized by nature and spirit. Early experiences like viewing things in the Bishop Museum (Hawaii’s State Museum of Natural and Cultural History) and seeing the Iolani Palace (the only royal palace in the US). Queen Liliuokalani’s collection of gothic furniture has stayed with me my whole life. I’m a gatherer of impressions from my experiences, and we moved a lot. My father was in the Navy.

These Hawaiian Kings Cloaks from the late 1700s made of colorful feathers were believed to provide spiritual protection for their wearers. I was blown away by them. The Black feathers came from the mamo birds, which are now extinct.

So I started doing these feather walls. Now I’m doing glass and bronze and mosaic, and all kinds of other things. I do a lot of different work besides painting. I like to create a world where the work is shown and exists. I was always impressed by other artists’ studios, notably Picasso’s. I have this passion for saving grand old houses, and they become part of my work with color and the way I arrange everything. And I hang my work in it. 

RRM: What is your latest building project?

HS: I recently bought the Searles Castle in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, because it captivated me, but we are in the early stages of restoration. 

RRM: What is it that attracts you to the late 1800s?

HS: I like vestiges of grandeur, and I’m crazy about Prince Felix Yussupov’s book Lost Splendor (1955), which talks about that period in which many of these things were built. Stanford White built my upstate house for Mrs. Hopkins, one of the wealthiest widows in the world. She and her husband were building the house when he died. It was a time when nothing was practical. There was a lot of fantasy, the Gardner Museum built by Isabella Gardner in Boston, a melting pot of ideas of high-level cultures from different periods. They loved the concept of time travel.

My work isn’t particularly of the Gilded Age (1865-1900) though some of my subject matters are, so I do intertwine all of that. I also collect art and furniture from when those houses were built, and I play with color.

My father, as I said, was a career Navy officer, and we moved all over. We lived in some big old houses growing up, old officer quarters. And I got a taste of these older homes. I took Louisiana architecture at Tulane, and I fell in love with 1860s homes. At that time, I visited the Madewood Plantation House (a 19th-century Greek Revival-style mansion), which I now own, 50 years ago.

RRM: You do not consider yourself a part of the Neo-Expressionism movement of the early 1980s. Yet, many articles refer you to this movement.

HS: I get called that a lot because I paint, you know, with an expressionistic brushy style a lot, but there are many other elements. I do a lot of mark-making on my paintings which aligns it to the grid and more contemporary things. But I’ve always loved German Expressionism. And some of my subjects were done by some of the great Expressionist painters, and I didn’t know this; I didn’t find out until after I had done it. German Expressionist Emil Nolde painted the toucan. I love painting the toucan.

I loved this wonderful brushy painting style in America, like George Wesley Bellows, the Ashcan School (an artistic movement in the US during the late 19th-early 20th Century). When I went to Skowhegan (School of Painting and Sculpture) in Maine between my junior and senior year (at Tulane), we had a lot of contemporary figurative painters there, and that’s probably where the idea of the use of the brush came into play with me. And then I branched into my own and experimented. I mean, after trips to India, I picked up the back of the brush and started carving into the paint to recreate the cage. I’ve always lived with a 40-foot cage with birds, and it had wires that I wanted to recreate, and carving these wires in helps unify the surface of the painting, giving it a contemporary ring.

The repetition thing is a big one for me. It comes out of reciting mantras, the rosary, you know, prayers. I don’t see repetition as a boring, non-thinking way of going about it. I think of more it as to become what you are doing at a higher level.

I’m a collector of stuff, and there’s a great German word for what I’m trying to say. I can’t think of it offhand. Something like— What’s the word for collectives cabinet, would you know?

RRM: In German? No.

HS: That’s okay. What I mean is, I have to have a certain amount of stuff around me for inspiration before painting. (The word Slonem was looking for was Schatzkammer, used in English, meaning “collection of treasures.”)

RRM: Now that you are refurbishing these massive houses and working with your line of decorative accessories based on your artwork, are you able to remain as prolific as you were, say, 30 years ago?

HS: I haven’t slowed down at all. In fact, the surer I get, the more I’m able to do. There was much more struggle when I started as an artist to arrive at something uniquely mine. 

RRM: You’ve got so many famous people collecting your work worldwide. Have you ever been starstruck to learn that someone  was a collector of yours?

HS: Well, everyone. (laughs) The Kardashians came into my gallery and bought my work. Whoopie Goldberg and Sharon Stone collect my work. Each one is a thrill. There are kings and queens, sheiks, and princes. All kinds of sportspeople. You just work. The thing that makes my life is just creating. All the crap around you, good or bad, it’s a flash in the pan. I’m putting my best work out there, and it is either loved or hated. It doesn’t have any difference in my artwork.

RRM: Your work is highly recognizable. I read you never signed the front of your paintings. How did that come about? 

HS: When I came to New York, it was not done. Everyone signed the back. You sign the front of paperwork, not art. A few representational painters like Neil Oliver and Janet Fish signed on the front. But most people do not. Who wants to look at a label on a painting? It’s not a pair of jeans, that has to say, Calvin Klein. The signature messes things up. You don’t sit down and admire someone’s signature. You admire the art.

I think artists put too much emphasis on the signature in the past. Back then, the signature meant the world. Today the artwork is recognized. If you don’t know who’s work it is, it’s probably best not to know. (Laughs)

Snobbery is about recognition rather than reading who the artist is. And the value doesn’t diminish by not having the signature on the front.

RRM: I’ve read you paint the bunny pictures each morning before you start your day painting. How did this act come about, and is there this sense of rejuvenation upon creating the bunnies?

HS: Many of my smaller works become larger by hanging them in groups. So there are walls of these little paintings in frames hung up together. How long have I been doing warm-up paintings? I don’t know—a long time. Hans Hofmann did warm-up paintings about that size. It’s something I do. I don’t think about it.

RRM: I notice a lot of your early work contains people.

HS: I used to paint people all the time. I loved it. I had to kind of stop because I had to get ready for shows, and it was too much of a luxury. Specific images have resonated with me. There have been many, many shows of people. I did a series on famous Estonians for a show I did there once. I’ve done a million Hindu and Christain Saints for years and years and years. 

I’ve always had some strong metaphysical connection to what I paint. Lincoln captivated me because his wife, Mary Todd, held séances at the White House, and she was very interested in fashion and decorating the White House. She was heavily criticized for this. Someone once remarked, “Madam, you just spent four years of your husband’s salary redoing the White House.” 

And she responded, “Sir, when we arrived, mushrooms were growing out of the walls.” She was the first Jackie-O. 

So that interested me a lot, then later I found out it was Lincoln who wanted the séances. He never belonged to any organized religion, one of two presidents that didn’t. He went to mediums almost every day of his life. He fought the whole Civil War that way. A great book called the The Psychic Life of Abraham Lincoln describes his devotion to psychic phenomena in-depth. At that time, it was a very popular thing to do.

So I’ve done a lot of Lincoln portraits because I find him so interesting.

Hunt Slonem’s paintings are available  at the Bender Gallery in downtown Asheville, NC

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I spoke briefly with co-owner Bernadette Bender at Bender Gallery in downtown Asheville a few days later. Bender brought Slonem’s work to Asheville in early 2021.

RRM: Asheville wants to be seriously recognized as an art city like Scottsdale or Santa Fe. Talk about the importance of carrying artists like Hunt Slonem for Asheville’s future  art success.

BB: The Asheville area has a long-held visual arts tradition, primarily in artisan crafts created by local and regional artists. This has helped create a vibrant arts community that draws visitors near and far. We respect and admire the talented craftspeople and artists showing their work in Asheville. 

At Bender Gallery, we strive to bring something different and more far-reaching to the fine arts scene to further raise the status of Asheville as an arts destination. That is why we focus on abstract and figurative painters worldwide, with a complement of sculpture and design. By bringing in internationally renowned artists such as Hunt Slonem, the visibility of and credibility of our fine arts scene is enhanced. We often hear, “Wow! You have Hunt Slonem in Asheville?”

RRM: Slonem is sold worldwide and is held in high regard. Many of your artists are exclusive to your gallery or consider you their main gallery. Did you have any initial fears acquiring Slonem’s work that he might be too famous and overshadow your other artists? He is collected by Sharon Stone, Gina Gershon, Julianne Moore, Kris and Kylie Jenner, Mandy Moore, Jennifer Lopez, and Kate Hudson.

BB: No. We represent many fantastic, already well-established artists or those who are on an upwards career trajectory. Showing our other artists’ work alongside that of Hunt Slonem’s raises their exposure and validity in the field of fine art.

Bender Gallery

Downtown • 29 Biltmore Ave, Asheville, NC • (828) 505-8341 • bendergallery.com 

OPEN Mon-Sat 10-6 pm Sunday 10-5 pm