Artist's Statement

Bonner David Galleries, New York

April 4 - May 4, 2024


Looking at the paintings in DEFYING GRAVITY, I see visual echoes from my past—stained-glass windows in my mom’s church; the colorful box kite I flew with my dad; Peanuts cartoons playing on the TV.


They also bring to mind the reproductions of Picasso, Calder, Moore, and Van Gogh which hung in my childhood home. Clearly, the playfulness in their work has found its way into mine.


Some of the paintings take me even further back—to a building toy called Playplax: brightly colored, translucent plastic squares. As far back as I can remember, I was making abstract color structures.


But painting is not about communicating a pre-conceived idea; it’s a process of discovery. Like my artistic heroes, such as Miro, Diebenkorn, and Calder, I believe that the act of painting is revelatory. As Robert Motherwell said, “The subject does not pre-exist. It emerges out of the interaction between the artist and the medium.” 1


I never know what a painting is about until it is finished, and often, even then, it can’t be expressed in words. In this way abstract painting works very much like music.


A painting is finished not when it says what I meant to say, but when I feel it calm my body and mind; when it suddenly “breathes,” becoming a harmony that sparks the imagination and lifts my mood. This moment is always a bit of a shock.


Life’s uncertainties and burdens are a fact of life. But a painting that conveys soul, and love, and even joy, is a gift that enables those who enjoy it to momentarily defy gravity.


- David Michael Slonim




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(1) Robert Motherwell, “A Process of Painting,” in The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, ed. Stephanie Terenzio (New York, Oxford University Press, 1992), 139.








Abstract art is music for the eyes.


It energizes the spaces we live in, sparking the imagination, refreshing the body and mind. 


In the studio there is a moment when the painting begins to "breathe," when I feel my blood pressure drop and there's a sudden sense of quiet.


That feeling is always a bit of a shock. Often it feels like I'm watching it happen, as if the work is painting itself.


I've heard artists of all types acknowledge the unexpected resolution as part of their creative process. As Robert Frost put it, No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.


When a painting connects emotionally with a viewer, it's a gift. But it's a gift the artist received first, alone in the studio.


Sharing that feeling with others is the reason I paint.






I feel an affinity with abstract expressionists of the mid-20th century, sharing the Formalist belief that relationships of color, space, and texture powerfully convey aspects of human experience in purely visual terms.



- David Michael Slonim