Hunt Slonem
HELCONIA, 2005
Oil on panel
40 x 50 in
101.6 x 127 cm
Available at Surovek Gallery
There’s a spiritual message behind everything I do, and I’m fascinated by nature and its purity. I’m endlessly mesmerized by patterns in nature, which is why I use so much repetition just as in nature there is repetition in blades of grass, the leaves of trees, and feathers of birds. — Hunt Slonem
Hunt Slonem has donated one of his Bunny paintings to the Golisano Children's Museum in Naples, Florida.
Slonem lives and works in New York, where he has a large studio filled, not only with his paintings, but with dozens of the birds he cares for…and includes in his paintings.
He was born in 1951 in Kittery, Maine. His father was a Navy officer whose job required travel. The family moved often during Hunt’s formative years, including extended stays in Hawaii, California and Connecticut. Slonem settled in New York after completing a degree in painting and art history from Tulane University in New Orleans.
Slonem has continued his travels, restoring historic mansions in New York, Pennsylvania and Louisiana.
His works were exhibited at the Golisano Children's Museum two years ago and found an appreciative audience in both parents and children. “My entire career as a painter traces back to my childhood, my formative years spent in Hawaii and Nicaragua,” Slonem said in a interview with WGCU, the local PBS affiliate. “I hope that this gift, in some small way, inspires these children to create and imagine a more perfect world.”
Hunt Slonem’s work is in over eighty museum collections worldwide, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington, The Met, the Guggenheim, the New York Academy of Art, the Whitney, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Miro Foundation, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Jacksonville University Museum and the Orlando Museum of Art.
Like Hunt Slonem, Serge Strosberg has traveled extensively during his lifetime. He was born in Belgium in 1966, lived in Boston while his father completed a postdoc at Harvard on a Fulbright Scholarship.
The family returned to Paris where Strosberg studied graphic design at the Academie Julian and focused on painting in oil and egg tempera. He also studied morphology at Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts. He began painting portraits of friends and neighbors while in Paris.
After establishing himself and working in SoHo, Strosberg has created a home and studio in Palm Beach, where he has strong connections. “I’m Jewish.” he said in an interview in Boca Magazine. “My grandfather saved 400 Jewish children during the Second World War. There’s a picture of him in the history museum in Palm Beach. My father is a famous scientist, and my mother has a Ph.D in chemistry. We are a family of people who care about other people, and for me it’s taken the form of portraiture and art.”
Strosberg is a superb portrait painter, who has been commissioned to paint the portraits of many well known members of the international arts and academic world, including a portrait of Hunt Slonem.
Works from Strosberg’s Monkey Business in Palm Beach series are available at Surovek Gallery.
References:
Tom Hall. Hunt Slonem painting donated to Golisano Children's Museum. PBS/NPR/WCGU. January 24, 2025.
John Thomason. Take 5 With Serge Strosberg. Boca Magazine. May 21, 2025.
