“I create rooms which help me paint and give me a sense of something I need in order to work. What, I don’t know. Clutter, period works, I don’t know. I just float from room to room going through different periods of time and history and it’s fun.” —Hunt Slonem
The Art of Collecting Hunt takes on collecting with the same voracity as he does painting and goes about it with just as much love. A copy of Antiques and the Arts Weekly sits on his kitchen table and he admits to spending evenings looking at books full of pictures of houses and historical settings before bed. He is constantly curating, procuring items from auction houses, flea markets and other collectors. For him, there is no such thing as too much. He collects enough to fill this and three other properties. Hunt never counts. “I don’t know. I’m not big with numbers,” he says when asked about the size of his collection. “People are always asking me how old a certain piece is or how many birds I have and I really don’t know. Numbers don’t really mean much. I can’t even balance a checkbook. It’s what it is and what it looks like. I’m not a minimalist to put it mildly.” The space is Hunt’s fourth studio over the course of 20 years, including one which had an unheard of 89 rooms. This one has far fewer, but the function is the same. “I create rooms which help me paint and give me a sense of something I need in order to work. What, I don’t know. Clutter, period works, I don’t know. I just float from room to room going through different periods of time and history and it’s fun.” Hunt has been collecting since childhood. He was born in Kittery, Maine, moved around from Boston to Hawaii with his Naval officer father and spent time in Nicaragua as an exchange student. “We moved a lot so I wasn’t really allowed to hang on to things for long.” His earliest memory: Going to giant furniture sales in barns and antiques shows with his parents. “I was allowed to buy one thing and I bought what’s called a Sailor’s Valentine where people on ships would go from place to place and collect shells and then make a little box and then send them home to their wives,” he says. “That is the first thing I remember.” It was later in life when Hunt’s passion, serendipitously spurred on by his artwork, grew to what it is today. While doing a show early in his career he was asked to frame his pieces but lacked the money. “I realized I was doing a lot of sizes that fit Victorian portrait frames. There were a lot of stores in the East Village in those days, in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s, and I noticed that a lot of the people who had the frames had Gothic chairs around.” And thus, a collection and an obsession with Gothic furniture was born. “It’s like seeing the big toe of a Roman statue or piece of a foot in Rome and you imagine what the rest of it looked like because it was colossal and you’re only seeing a little piece of the picture.” MAY 2012 • AVENUE MAGAZINE | 57