Why Hunt Slonem's Rabbits, Birds, and Butterflies Mean More Than They Let On
Hunt Slonem’s rabbits, birds, and butterflies look like pure joy on the wall. But each one carries a story, part zodiac sign, part childhood memory, part spiritual ritual. Here’s what’s actually behind the motifs everyone recognizes but few people know the meaning of.
Why Rabbits?
Slonem didn’t set out to be so widely recognised for his bunny works. He had kept rabbits as pets since childhood, drawn to the simplicity of their shape with an oval body, round ears and two dark eyes, clean enough to repeat endlessly without ever feeling mechanical. Slonem began painting bunnies in the 1980s, and the habit became a ritual: rabbits are still the first thing he paints each morning, a warm-up easing him into a day’s work.
Their symbolism deepened much later, almost by accident. Sometime in the 1990s, over dinner, Slonem realised he was born in the Chinese zodiac’s Year of the Rabbit, a sign associated with luck and productivity. It reframed everything. Since then, Slonem has described the rabbits as something close to self-portraits: not likenesses, exactly, but stand-ins, each one carrying its own slightly different mood. Add in centuries of rabbit folklore: the trickster hare, the White Rabbit leading Alice somewhere strange. The paintings start looking less like decoration and more like a quiet, ongoing conversation Slonem is having with himself.
A Studio Full of Birds
The birds are also the origin of his most technical signature: the crosshatch. For decades, Slonem kept his New York studio filled with dozens of live exotic birds, at one point living alongside a birdcage some forty feet long. Looking at the world through that grid of bars for years, he began scraping fine lines of wet paint off his canvases in the same pattern, a direct, almost accidental translation of the cage into the paintwork. It’s the texture collectors recognise instantly, and it comes straight out of his living arrangement with the animals he paints.
Butterflies carry their own layer of meaning on top of this — for Slonem, they’re tied to metamorphosis and ascension, a nod to the Garden of Eden and to nature’s endless capacity for transformation.
Repetition as Prayer
Ask Slonem why he paints the same subjects over and over, and he doesn’t describe habit or brand-building; he describes devotion. He’s compared his repetition to the rosary, to Mandala mantras, to any practice where doing the same thing again and again is a way of merging with it. Painting in series, for him, functions as a kind of prayer.
That idea matters more than it might seem. It reframes a wall of forty bunny portraits from “the artist has a signature move” to something closer to a meditative practice, made visible, each canvas a single repetition in a much longer act of devotion. It’s also why his work suits salon-style hangs so well: the paintings were always meant to be seen in multiples, building rhythm the way a chant does.
A Life Built Around the Same Instincts
The spiritual and symbolic threads in Slonem’s paintings don’t stay confined to canvas; they show up in how he lives. His well-documented habit of restoring historic homes (he’s owned several, including a storied Newport mansion he acquired this year) follows the same instinct that drives the paintings: pattern, density, color, repetition, ritual. The studio, the aviary, the antique frames sourced from flea markets to hold his bunnies salon-style- it’s all one continuous aesthetic world, whether it’s on a wall or in a room.
Why This Matters for Collectors
A bunny isn’t just a bunny; it’s a self-portrait, a zodiac sign, a small act of daily ritual made permanent in paint. A crosshatched bird isn’t just texture; it’s the visible trace of a man who spent thirty years looking at the world through the bars of a birdcage. Knowing the story doesn’t just make for good conversation with guests; it’s the difference between owning a decorative object and owning a piece of someone’s genuine, decades-long spiritual practice.
That’s the real appeal of collecting Slonem: the work is exuberant enough to stand on its own, and meaningful enough to reward a closer look.