|
NEW YORK TIMES
JULY 22, 2004
'A CANVAS OF 100 ROOMS'
by Claudia Steinberg
After a long search through high-priced downtown real estate, the
artist Hunt Slonem found new quarters to rent that were worthy of
his ambition to live large and paint a lot: 50,000 square
feet, including a terrace, on far West 10th Streeet.
In New York City, a city where people count their space in inches,
Mr. Slonem counts in rooms - some 100 of them. Instead of
being starved for space, he had the opposite problem - cleaning,
painting, furnishing and finding new purposes for an almost
limitless number of once-stultifying cubicles. This year, he
moved in 50 truckloads of furniture, some it borrowed and some his
own, including an extra-large sofa from Andy Warhol's Factory, a
long English refectory table and some imposing chairs; his potted
forest of orchids, citrus and palm trees; more than two dozen birds;
and 30 years' worth of his art.
A Denver-based company called Corporate Express had occupied the
space, near the Richard Meier towers, but left behind 300 cubicles,
coffee-stained wall-to-wall carpeting and countless swivel chairs.
"It was a total mess," Slonem said.
Worse than the mess was the aura of hundreds of office workers that
lingered behind and, he said, oppressed him. So a friend from
Houston helped him decorate the place. They hung vintage
brocade fabrics on the walls, and within weeks, Mr. Slonem had
covered endless linoleum hallways, hundreds of walls and even the
carpeted floors with layers of intensely colored paint.
Perhaps only an artist would dare to use his color combinations.
One salon was inspired by the color of a Sweet 'N Low packet, a
lively pink Mr. Slonem describes as a very social color. He
complemented the saccharine walls with rosy furniture from different
periods and places, including an Edwardian banquette, a French
fin-de-siecle parlor set and 1950's Palm Beach chairs. "I have
been ridiculed for this, but I realized that if you have a mass of
pink objects, they really work together," he said.
He has other theories. Blue, he thinks, should be reserved for
big things - the ocean, the sky or the meditating mind.
Yellow, he believes, aids inspiration, so one of his boxy rooms
glows like potent lemon custard. Still, neither his tropical
plants nor his radical palette nor his neo-Gothic chairs (which cast
a somber shadow onto the scene) could completely exorcise the
ambience of a dull workplace or overcome the low ceilings and neon
lights. And so he has embraced the jarring discrepancy between
the 9-to-5 world and his own Victorian exoticism.
Mr. Slonem has always shared his studios with large flocks of birds,
who serve as his muses and models. Parrots, finches, cockatoos
and toucans dominate his large canvases. Since he is proud
that his birds were not captured in the wild, but bred in captivity,
he often portrays them as caged behind a grid of lines directly
scraped into the wet paint.
But the birds also enjoy hours of freedom while he paints - and the
African grays compete with green aras for the coveted spot on his
shoulder. (Frequent bird bites are the risk of this
arrangement.)
Not to distract from the exuberant plumage, Mr. Slonem keeps his
studio space pristine white. The birds sometimes become
artwork. In 1996, he covered the walls of a room at Art in
General, a downtown gallery, with thousands of their feathers.
His formal reception area glows absinthe green, and it houses bird
sculptures in a glass-enclosed room that formerly housed computers.
A long corridor from the reception area leads past a large gym, a
bishop's chair, a bathroom, a water cooler and the cacophony of his
birds imitating the sounds of a buy office - phones ringing, voices
saying, "Hello? Hello?"
"I need to be surrounded by living things," he said.
"Otherwise, I can't work." (He has one cat, an Abyssinian
named Kitu, and has also granted asylum to four turtles.)
After painting and hanging fabric, Mr. Slonem asked Michael Butler,
one of the clairvoyants he consults almost daily, for a psychic
reading of the space. "This place was designated for Hunt by
his karma," Mr. Butler said. "It's not always possible to find
that in one's lifetime, but he is a very spiritual person."
Mr. Butler determined that the dead center of the space, which he
named the Apex Room, was the most important of many sanctuaries that
Mr. Slonem uses for meditation. The lavender-colored chamber
is devoted to saints of nationalities and religions honored by Mr.
Slonem, including St. Francis of Assisi.
Mr. Slonem, who sells his paintings for up to $50,000 each and whose
work has been collected by the Whitney Museum and the Metropolitan
Museum, will not disclose his rent, saying only that it is a "great
deal." (Alan Victor, the executive vice president of the
Lansco Corporation, a commercial brokerage firm in Manhattan,
estimated that space that large would normally rent for $480,000 to
$720,000 a year.)
One might accuse Mr. Slonem of excess - ok, go ahead, accuse him of
excess. The other day he said he discovered yet another room,
but there are advantages to having so many. He has finally had
a chance to display his paintings thematically and chronologically -
butterfly paintings in one room, hypnotic monkey eyes (he calls them
his guardians) in another, rabbits (his sign in the Chinese zodiac)
in a third.
And if his friends, his masseur, his personal trainer or guests lose
track of him in the building, they can always call him on his cell
phone.
He still gets lost sometimes. But he said, "I finally feel
very organized, because there is a room for every activity - one for
writing thank-you notes, a room for getting dressed for the day and
another for black-tie gatherings."
There are also two kitchens, which could be described as one for
cocktails and one for cockatoos (where elaborate, protein-rich meals
for the birds are prepared.) Mr. Slonem eats take-out food or
at restaurants.
Certainly furnishing the place was no problem. He is familiar
with the flea markets and auction houses of the world. Some
pieces he bought on eBay. Others are only temporarily parked
at his place, as storage for his friends. Sandra Long, the
antiques dealer, has left an ebony table, chairs and sofas in his
Red Room, and they will surely be missed when they move out again.
On the other hand, the space is filling quickly, which has led Mr.
Slonem to think even bigger. "A hundred thousand square feet
would entertain me for the rest of my life," he said. And
although he also owns a 30-room house in Kingston, NY, some part of
him wants to own a plantation in Louisiana (he studied art at Tulane
University there).
If all else fails, he is ready to buy a castle in Germany.
|
