Deb Slowey, a visual artist who lives and works in Florida’s Tampa Bay region, has developed a varied and engaging range of painted imagery that tells stories in the form of personal musings and re-tellings. Working with material from myths, fables, dreams and folk art, Slowey generates a universe of the secular sacred in which science and faith work in concert. Motifs derived from the Fibonacci Sequence, the Golden Ratio and Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity often overlay and shape the imagery of Slowey’s art, adding an overlay of rationality and science.
Although her work has a bold inventiveness that marks it as contemporary, Slowey sees her role as being like that of a Chinese artist/sage who communicates with and honors the artists of the past. Animated by her inner convictions, Slowey’s work can be playful, cerebral and esoteric all at once. Slowey’s art brings together the inspiration from many artistic masters over time, among them William Blake, M. C. Escher and Pieter Breughel. Her eclectic art, which fearlessly mixes inspirations, moods and messages across time, always feels searching and dynamic.
Slowey’s philosophy and approach were shaped by a free-spirited childhood filled with fantasy and pretending. She originally wanted to be an actress, but then enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine art which offered access to the nearby Barnes Foundation and a faculty that cultivated skilled representation. Later studies at the Bob Blackburn Printmaking Workshop and mentoring by artist Will Barnet shaped and refined her artistic vision. Years of living in the Chelsea District of New York City and access to the city’s great museums further enriched her range of influences.
Her recent works on canvas, such as “Infinite Dance of Intelligence” demonstrate Slowey’s interwoven aesthetic and bold contrasting palette. In a rhythmic, collage-like composition set in a Fibonacci cosmos, a tiny lethal octopus and a giant blue whale creates a surprising harmony that invites contemplation and reflection.
Other recent works—most notably a series of paintings on glass—are intended to narrate cautionary tales and fables updated into a contemporary aesthetic vernacular. Inspired by a painting method that Wassily Kandinsky and Vera Molnar came across while traveling in the mountains of Bavaria, Slowey has found a way to use glass to spectacular effect. Painting on tempered glass panels, then scraping, adding gold leaf and crushed glass, and even adding touches on the front of the glass, she achieves a magical sense of luminosity. One example of this series, “The Illusion of More” features a purple poodle gazing at his own reflection and craving the apparently larger bone carried by his double. A delightful illumination of the foolishness of greed, the painting glows like a stained glass window in a church from the Age of Aquarius.
Slowey’s aesthetic vision—which has the visionary vibe of conscious dreaming—keeps her work from feeling didactic or judgmental. The delight she takes in her sources, transmuted through a personal sensibility, comes through in her radiant, counter-balanced compositions. Surprising and insightful, Deb Slowey’s art feels radiantly alive, offering both escape and inspiration to her viewers. Supported by her utterly unique use of color and media, Slowey has created a parallel universe that expands the consciousness of her viewers to reach towards her own.
When looking over the paintings of Slowey-Raguso, you may come across a figure you recognize from Greek mythology: perhaps Artemis, Daphne, or Apollo. Then again, you might also see Albert Einstein’s thinking, Joan of Arc’s determination, or a might blue whale in harmony with the oceans. The artist’s fantastic mix of imagery- derived from myths, science, and personal experience- emanates from a personal pantheon that illustrates what Slowey-Raguso calls a “humanistic conviction of faith". Ancient stories, Catholic notables, and flash insights from the artist’s lucid dreams also make appearances in her charmingly idiosyncratic and almost psychedelically vivid works.
In one recent canvas, A Sign in the Sky of Something Somewhere Else, a yellow octopus with red spots sprawls in the lower left, unfurling its tentacles, an emblem of limited, deadly beauty. Beyond it, a Fibonacci spiral winds towards a distant vast universe (Orion) overseen by a dolphin and her calf, a symbol of motherly intelligence. Mathematically charged rectangles, filled with strong colors of emerald green, deep blue and bright yellow ground the composition. Adding to the pure sensation of the piece, the effects of bright oil colors are supplemented by other materials: crystals, gold leaf and flocking.
Slowey-Raguso explains the inherently mathematical (and abstract) underpinnings of her art in this way:
I have a firm conviction that a painting can be composed to bring a person a sense of awe and wonder by a visual, in your face composition. Kind of like a collective unconscious of Jung but not cerebral but visual when we pick up a seashell and see it as beautiful; why is a “perfect rose” perfect? A symphony is different from a waltz because of some innate, underlying structure. In my painting, these structures lie in numbers: Fibonacci and the geometric manifestation of Fibonacci, a Logarithmic spiral, not the “rule of thirds.” The law of chance is also married to it and can be understood by the patterns, or un-patterns, in fractals.
Taking from a variety of myths and assembling her own is Slowey-Raguso’s ongoing personal project. “Your life and time,” she explains, “can appear in a painting to help you feel again why you felt a certain way in the past.” It is that sense of underlying emotion, transmitted through personal symbols, that charges each painting with its singular beauty. The artist and painter is a creator who is infinitely moved by Creation and who has found a way to share that sense of awe through her art.