DAVID MIC HAEL SLONIM
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May 21 – June 2, 2018 Jackson Hole
DAVID MIC HAEL SLONIM Wavelength
Jackson Hole | Scottsdale | AltamiraArt.com 3
Windhover Oil on canvas | 60 x 36 inches Enquire
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Wavelength
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Lately, David Michael Slonim has been reflecting on silence—the silence he feels in nature, the silence he finds in mundane moments, tugging the garbage bin down his long Indiana driveway at night. Silence both calm and quiet. Silence as a state of being. “The same thing happens in the studio when I am painting away,” he says. “The colors start to harmonize, the paintings start to breathe. A calm settles over. It becomes a visual oasis.” As Slonim hopes Altamira will become as well in the presence of Wavelength. True to its title, this collection of new paintings explores the communicative potential of art—both in practice and in presentation— how art can translate the essence of nature. An inveterate communicator himself, listening lies at the core of his process: he listens to his paintings, letting them guide their own orientation to nature’s rhythms and forms. “To become good at painting requires increasing your listening skills more than your expressing skills,” he says. “It’s more important for me to become sensitive to what the canvas is saying, to listen to what my eyes are doing and my gut is telling me. Most of the time, a painting goes in a totally different direction and takes months if not years to complete.” This attunement took decades to cultivate: As an art student at the Rhode Island
School of Design, he remembers hearing his professors ask, “What is the painting actually trying to become?” Back then, such questions seemed to wash over him. Now—after decades spent as an illustrator and plein air painter—their words resonate as he lets the paintings themselves take the lead. “In the same way we live life by improvising conversations and interactions, I paint by improvising within a structure,” he says. “Each stroke is a decision which leads to others.” Canvases live in his studio as long as they need to, talking to each other and the images of masterworks he tacks up on the walls (currently clippings of Degas and Wyeth). The silence that settles on each canvas represents a resolution, the visual answer to the series of turns it took to arrive at such peacefulness. “Older layers often show through more recent ones, similar to the way our personal histories affect who we are today,” he says. His today as an abstract painter now consciously folds in influences from his past: the fine art prints his mother hung in the house (Van Gogh, Calder, Picasso); the box kites he flew with his dad; the stained-glass windows he would stare at during Catholic mass; the Looney Tunes cartoons he’d watch on weekends. These lessons in color, shape, texture and line remerge now through patient play, as pervasive joy.
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Gentle Moon Oil on linen | 40 x 36 inches Enquire
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Blue, Gray, Black Oil on linen | 48 x 36 inches Silencio Oil on linen | 60 x 48 inches Enquire
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Wavelength Oil on canvas | 60 x 48 inches Enquire
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Kingfisher Oil on canvas | 60 x 48 inches Enquire
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Magic Planet Oil on canvas | 60 x 48 inches Enquire
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Woman Bathing – detail Oil on linen | 60 x 48 inches Enquire
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Bright Line Oil on linen | 48 x 36 inches Enquire
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Love Story Oil on canvas | 40 x 30 inches Enquire
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“ The act of painting is inherently optimistic—a refusal to believe life is chaotic and meaningless. If harmony and order can exist on a canvas, then harmony and order are real, which means a good painting points toward hope.” - david michael slonim
Red Move, Yellow Move, Blue Move Oil on linen | 24 x 54 inches (triptych) Enquire
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172 Center Street | Jackson, Wyoming 83001 AltamiraArt.com | 307-739-4700
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