Jill Slaymaker remembers fun Sunday mornings sitting on her father’s lap as he read her the “funny papers.” She was inspired enough that she began creating her own comic strips by age five.
She would lie for hours near her mother’s easel watching her paint. Often, Slaymaker drew the young models from the Sears and Roebuck catalogs while her mother painted.
Slaymaker took those early memories with her when she majored in art, then began her own career, mixing comics, nature, figures, and the beauty of Asian woodblock prints to create her own signature art.
On September 8, 35 years of her colorful, magical, whimsical, and sometimes dark art will go on display at the Michael Murphy Gallery in South Tampa. Also, a special children’s mixed media workshop is scheduled with Slaymaker on Saturday, Sept. 9 from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.
A deeper dive into the art of Jill Slaymaker
One series of paintings that still inspire Slaymaker today, she calls her orange tree series. While visiting Rome years back, Slaymaker fell ill. She found a 900-year-old orange tree still producing and used it as her shade while painting. Those works have become a symbol of hope. Their stunning bright colors reach out.
“I think I had just turned 50 and thinking about aging,” she recalled. “I saw this tree, 900 years and still full of oranges. I sat under it and painted with watercolors and within a few days, I was healed. I’ve always thought of it as a magical orange tree and since then have included orange trees as a symbol of hope, and wellness and rejuvenation.”
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The title of the Tampa show is Alchemy and Other Magical Thinking. “The way I view the orange tree is a form of magical thinking,” Slaymaker said. “Believing there is more here than meets the eye, or approaching the work in that there is great mystery in nature we don’t fully understand.”
Exhibited nationally and internationally, Slaymaker’s work has been displayed at the far-flung locations:
- Tate Modern, London
- Dabawenyo Museum, Philippines
- Blum Helman, Pierogi, Arena Gal
- Kustera Projects in New York City
Among her 14 solo exhibition locations are The Nabi Museum of the Arts, New Jersey, and the Davis Mini-Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona, Spain. Slaymaker’s work is also in numerous private and public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
A lush look on landscapes
Art historian Robert Rosenblum described Slaymaker’s work from the early 1990s as part of the Neo-Sublime and Neo-Romantic landscape movements. Her paintings from that time explore the relationship between nature and modern man. With symbols from science and technology layered over serene landscapes and skies. Her series, “Vanity and Insanity,” includes more than 50 self-portraits in a variety of media. She experimented with stamp printing at this time, which led to the series, “Variations on a Tree of Life,” printed on wood.
Slaymaker returned to Romantic landscapes in the early 2000s. But this time with figures. Soon after, cartoonish art, which had interested her since childhood, led to narrative figure paintings.
“I am intrigued by the vastness of nature, and complex worlds that exist within each other,” Slaymaker said. “My work often depicts otherworldly environments, inhabited by a lone figure a bit lost in a chaotic world.”
More than meets the eye
At times, the view of whimsical clouds she sees from her 40th story Manhattan apartment is blended into her art, she said. “Here in Manhattan, you have to go looking for nature. I just love creating these magical otherworldly environments to fantasize and escape into, sort of a joyful strange place. I almost always include a narrative, some little story I’m trying to tell. But I’m not trying to hit people over the head with it. I try to be more subtle, to let them see it.”
There is often more to her pieces than immediately meets the eye, she said.
So, what will visitors take away from the Slaymaker collection?
“In recent years it feels like there is a lot of division in the world, and with the pandemic there was a lot of the world that has felt a little scary,” she said. “With the orange tree, I was trying to lift myself up. Orange is a bright cheerful color. During the pandemic and even before, I wanted to bring a sense of joy in finding beauty in nature no matter what else is going on in the world, creating a sense of humor and having a sense of mystery and awe about nature.”
With over 40 years of experience, Michael Murphy Gallery is the premier fine art gallery and custom framing resource in Tampa. Click here to learn more.
