Altamira Fine Art Scottsdale is pleased to present a new exhibition for David Michael Slonim in Arizona. Slonim's work will hang alongside California artist Timothy Horn, in a dual exhibit of works on canvas, opening January 28th. Both artists will have approximately a dozen new peices in the exhibition.
Please join us for an Artist Reception Thursday, February 7th from 6:30-9pm, during the Gold Palette ArtWalk on Main Street. Both artists will be in attendance and live music and refreshments will accent the evening.
David Michael Slonim folds influences from his past into his abstract paintings. Reflecting on his latest series at Altamira, he traces three imprints from childhood: the stained-glass windows he studied during Catholic mass; the box kites he flew with his dad; and the PlayPlax interlocking squares he constructed into towers. Each an experiment in light playing over planes of color. These early lessons in line, palette and texture remerge now through patient experimentation, as pervasive joy. “The act of painting is inherently optimistic—a refusal to believe life is chaotic and meaningless,” he says. “If harmony and order can exist on a canvas, then harmony and order are real, which means a good painting points toward hope.”
His paintings do more than point toward hope; they uphold it. As the exhibit title suggests, Slonim is meditating on structure in his latest work, the ways in which attending to line and light can make communion between painter and viewer possible. In Slonim's childhood home, these feelings were evoked when standing in front of the prints by Picasso and van Gogh or beneath the Calder replica that his mother had placed around their home. Never directing her son toward abstraction, she let him live admidst modern masterpeices, slowly and cumulatively coming to his own aesthetic. He listened to those works, as he does now to his own, letting the paintings guide their orientation to nature’s rhythms.
In the presence of resolved paintings, Slonim finds a solace not unlike the spiritual experience of basking in rays refracted through stained-glass. “Paintings are one of the ways in which we reach for meaning and find our way in the universe,” he says. “I’m trying to express something beyond the senses. It’s a little miracle every time.”
Artist Biography
David Michael Slonim was born in Miami, Florida, in 1966. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Rhode Island School of Design in 1988. Slonim’s fine art career began with a sold-out show in 1998 at Overland Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona. His work is inspired by a wide variety of masters including Cezanne, Mitchell, Diebenkorn, Rothko, and Picasso. Slonim develops visual rhythms from a combination of observation and improvisation. His work reaches simultaneously for the playful and spiritual through structured, improvisational abstraction.
“I feel an affinity with the abstract expressionists of the mid-20th century,” he says. “I share their belief that relationships of color, space, and texture can convey aspects of human experience in purely visual terms.”
His work has been selected for the Coors Western Art Exhibit, Great American Artists, C.M. Russell Auction, Western Rendezvous of Art, Western Miniatures Show at the C.M. Russell Museum, and the Rising Stars exhibit at the Desert Caballeros Western Museum. Solo exhibitions at regional museums include the Richmond Art Museum, Richmond, Indiana; Minnetrista Cultural Center, Muncie, Indiana; and Anderson Center for the Arts, Anderson, Indiana.
Slonim’s paintings hang in the permanent collections of several museums, as well as important private and corporate collections. His work has been featured in Western Art & Architecture, Southwest Art, American Art Collector, Big Sky Journal, USArt, Plein Air Magazine, and Indianapolis Monthly.
Slonim is also an award-winning children’s book author and illustrator, and speaks regularly to audiences of all ages about creativity. He and his wife Bonnie have four adult children, and live in Anderson, Indiana.
