‘Shimmer’ is a signature gestural butterfly painting by Hunt Slonem. Butterflies can be found throughout Slonem’s Neo-expressionist body of work. The background of the painting is a brilliant metallic gold, contrasting the wings of the white multicolor butterflies. Slonem goes back into the painting with the end of his brush to carve out a grid like pattern, giving the painting an energetic texture and exposing the blue underpainting.

Hunt Slonem (b. 1951, Kittery, ME) is an American artist best known for his “maximalist” paintings of wildlife exotica — most famously birds, rabbits and butterflies. Drawing inspiration from the spiritual and natural worlds, Slonem repeats these motifs on an epic scale in an act of visual and artistic mantra. Rendered through loose, gestural brushwork, his figures dissolve into rhythmic patterns at the edges of abstraction, creating symphonies of color, line and form across a highly textural canvas. His oeuvre’s meditative qualities are equally matched, by a “remarkable levity… a lightness of being” (Henry Geldzahler, Metropolitan Museum of Art 1996).