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 fuelled 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.
