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BIO
Jonathan Santlofer was born in New York City and earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree at Boston University. He returned to New York to earn his Master of Fine arts from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and supported his early painting career with several teaching jobs.
Santlofer has had over one hundred solo and group exhibitions including James Graham & Sons, NYC, The New Museum, NYC, The Drawing Center, NYC, Institute of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan, Galleria Peccolo, Livorno, Italy, Betsy Rosenfield and Klein galleries, Chicago, IL. His work is such permanent collections as the Institute of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Michigan, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana, as well numerous corporate and private collections.
Santlofer's major concerns -- reality versus illusion -- have remained constant throughout the evolution of his artwork. He was first known as an abstract painter, but after a gallery fire in Chicago destroyed five years of his work, he retreated to Rome where he spent time looking at Renaissance and Baroque art, drawing, and began to write fiction as a form of creative release. Almost five years after the fire, he returned to the art scene with figurative work -- a series of 100 carved and painted relief portraits of famous artists against detailed replicas of that particular artist's famous artwork. These fascinating hybrid pieces mixed not only painting and sculpture, but image and content.
In numerous articles and reviews over the course of his career, Santlofer's work has been described as "dramatic, supercharged, lush, and witty," Santlofer's work is "creating it's own synthesis of modernism, combining traces of Van Gogh, Matisse, Cubism, Futurism, and Expressionism." "Santlofer's work resonates and evokes feeling beyond what meets the viewer's eye."
Jonathan Santlofer is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Painting grants, a Skowhegan Scholarship, several Visiting Artist residencies at The Vermont Studio Center, Visiting Artist at the American Academy In Rome, and is a member of the board of directors of Yaddo, one of the countries oldest and most distinguished arts communities.
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AUTHOR TALK
 How the Book Was Born
THE DEATH ARTIST was born one night around 2:00 A.M.
When five years of my artwork was destroyed in a Chicago gallery fire I was unsure of what to do next in my work and accepted an invitation to be a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome. For six months I looked at art, made collages, and for the first time began to write fiction. I had written before, but only nonfiction, and only about art. Now fiction seemed appropriate -- a place to lose myself. Soon, I was dividing my days between painting and writing. Ultimately, the writing I did in Rome was a kind of training ground; it wasn't until I returned to New York that I considered writing a novel.
There was never a question that I would use the art world, my life as an artist, and my love of art history in my book. For years I had alternated between reading a "real" book, that is, literature, and then, only after feeling I had earned the right, would allow myself to read a mystery or thriller. I chose to write a thriller because I mistakenly thought it would be easier, but also because I have always loved the genre -- from Hitchcock films to Patricia Highsmith stories.
Over the next years writing became part of my routine -- mostly late at night when the world slowed down and was quiet.
For years I'd been known for my abstract paintings, but writing drew me to the literary and narrative aspects of art, and soon I was making representational imagery. It was while writing THE DEATH ARTIST -- that I rediscovered my artwork. Now the work I make is totally representational; and I think of the various pieces as "fictions," or as a kind of storytelling.
At the moment I am preparing for two drawing exhibitions while I sketch out my next novel. Truthfully, I can no longer imagine my life without both activities.
For interested readers, here are some links to see the actual art which is reference in The Death Artist. Comments on the art come directly from the author (WARNING: if you haven't read the book yet, you might want to bookmark this page and return when you're done . . . there are a few clues in here!):
Jaques-Louis David
The Death of Marat 1793
Because it is a classic and so graphic in its portrayal of murder this was absolutely the first painting that came to mind for use in THE DEATH ARTIST. In it, David depicts with almost police-photo precision the murder of Marat, a martyr to the French Revolution known as "the People's Friend." Marat is stabbed in the bath where he spent mot of his days due to a painful skin disease. I was certain THE DEATH ARTIST would just love this painting.
Titian
The Flaying of Marsyas 1575-76
The combination of beauty and horror made this great renaissance painting a natural for The Death Artist. Though Titian's painting is mythological, THE DEATH ARTIST uses it quite literally for its grisly depiction of flaying, or skinning of a body.
Ed Kienholz
The Birthday 1964
The naturally macabre nature of Pop artist Ed Kienholz's installations seemed perfectly suited for THE DEATH ARTIST. The use of cast figures and objects -- which look both real and fabricated -- have a creepy, frozen-in-time quality. There is a sort of deathlike pall that hovers over a Kienholz artwork that I was certain would appeal to The Death Artist.
Willem deKooning
Women Accabonac 1966 and Woman Sag Harbor 1964
I wanted to use deKooning not only because he is one of my personal favorites, but because his work is so alive -- the complete opposite of THE DEATH ARTIST's eerie, static tableaux. The fact that this period of deKooning's work is figural and so fluidly painted suited a particular scene in the book and represented a departure for the deranged death artist. Here, to convince Kate -- the heroine of the story and a famous art historian -- that he is a great artist, THE DEATH ARTIST uses the painter, deKooning, upon whom she based her doctoral thesis to a perverse and shocking end.
Jean Michel Basquiat
Self Portrait 1982
Basquiat, the archetypal wildly successful yet tragic young artist of the 1980s, was an obvious choice as a stand in for my character, Wilie Handley, Kate's protégé -- and I thought THE DEATH ARTIST would also make that connection. This image is used by The Death Artist in conjunction with a Frederick Church Hudson River painting and is the final clue Kate receives that leads to the novel's denoument.
To research more art on the web, try doing an "image" search at Google.com, or you can check out art-specific sites such as artchive.com and artnet.com.
© Copyright 2002, William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins. All rights reserved.
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