Tom Slaughter

Description

The Artist Book Foundation is pleased to announce the publication of Tom Slaughter, an extensive monograph of the artist's enormous body of work that celebrates his enduring optimism, personal and artistic honesty, and charming brashness in a landscape of pure joy. Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art, reveals Slaughter as a treasured friend whose artistry was fueled by endless curiosity about life's simple pleasures, a man who made his innumerable friends and acquaintances part of his personal community. Slaughter's lifelong friend, actor and writer David Marshall Grant, remembers the artist's delight when, in a high school art class, he was introduced to the mysteries of negative space and the enigmatic power it brings to an artwork. Artist, art critic, and independent curator Andy Fabo describes his friend's vibrant art as all about pleasure. Even in the most turbulent of times, he took a celebratory approach to his art, offering his viewers a sensual and visual delight. For Jon Robin Baitz, playwright and screenwriter, the 'sweetness' of Slaughter's images was insistent, a compulsive scrutinising of the visual world of small domesticities. Marthe Jocelyn, the artist's former wife and a children's book author and illustrator, reflects on the couple's acclaimed collaboration on a series of books for the very youngest readers. Jim Kempner, gallery owner, recalls Slaughter as a man of charm and enormous artistic talent who always managed to retain a childlike innocence. Artist George Negroponte remembers Slaughter as focusing on the life around him, especially his daughters, in a unique mixture of everyday images, abstracted yet conveying popular culture. And in an interview both informative and poignant, Slaughter's friends, artists Stephen Hannock, Jean-Paul Russell, Robert Harms, Ray Charles White, and Scott Kilgour pay tribute to a dear friend whose prolific career, though cut short, was remarkable for a visual language that makes his art accessible to everyone. AUTHOR: Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art, reveals Slaughter as a treasured friend whose artistry was fueled by endless curiosity about life's simple pleasures, a man who made his innumerable friends and acquaintances part of his personal community. SELLING POINT: Slaughter's work, with its seemingly effortless whimsy rendered with a strong sense of line, colour, and rhythm, has also been compared to Matisse 314 colour and 10 b/w images

Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art, reveals Slaughter as a treasured friend whose artistry was fueled by endless curiosity about life's simple pleasures, a man who made his innumerable friends and acquaintances part of his personal community. Slaughter's lifelong friend, actor and writer David Marshall Grant, remembers the artist's delight when, in a high school art class, he was introduced to the mysteries of negative space and the enigmatic power it brings to an artwork. Artist, art critic, and independent curator Andy Fabo describes his friend's vibrant art as all about pleasure. Even in the most turbulent of times, he took a celebratory approach to his art, offering his viewers a sensual and visual delight. For Jon Robin Baitz, playwright and screenwriter, the "sweetness" of Slaughter's images was insistent, a compulsive scrutinizing of the visual world of small domesticities. Marthe Jocelyn, the artist's former wife and a children's book author and illustrator, reflects on the couple's acclaimed collaboration on a series of books for the very youngest readers. Jim Kempner, gallery owner, recalls Slaughter as a man of charm and enormous artistic talent who always managed to retain a childlike innocence. Artist George Negroponte remembers Slaughter as focusing on the life around him, especially his daughters, in a unique mixture of everyday images, abstracted yet conveying popular culture. And in an interview both informative and poignant, Slaughters' friends, artists Stephen Hannock, Jean-Paul Russell, Robert Harms, Ray Charles White, and Scott Kilgour pay tribute to a dear friend whose prolific career, though cut short, was remarkable for a visual language that makes his art accessible to everyone.

Artist and native New Yorker Tom Slaughter didn't just capture this contrast with his palette of primaries; he reimagined it. In Slaughter's urban landscapes, building facades could be impossibly red or yellow or blue, as if to advertise the creativity emanating from their insides. Water towers and cranes and metal also received this treatment on occasion. But he could just as readily fashion them in black, in that darkness visible to so, so many wandering eyes late at night in the city that never sleeps.--The Berkshire Eagle