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lors, country quick-stop diners (“Birdies Beer & Burger”) and Southwest American taco and chile stands.
Slack captures not only the exact image but the Zeitgeist, and one observes these constructions with the feeling of being there not just in place but, remarkably, in time.
One work in particular stands out for the emotions it evokes, a memorial to Slack’s grandmother portrayed sitting in a dimly-lit living room watching TV, probably in the 1950s, while a freight train goes slowly past her window in the night. The scene is set within the cabinet of a wooden 1950s TV set, and an antenna and a set of bronzed baby shoes sit on top.
His two-dimensional work includes stunning and dramatic images of older houses on fire, of stone chimneys standing alone in fields like sentinels of loneliness, and, like his winning painting, of a lonely country road twisting through a forest with a single man standing by the side looking out.
He portrays loss in metaphorical and symbolic ways that can seem haunting and even chilling to some observers.
Slack paints houses for a living in a time honored tradition of the working artist that goes back from before Phidias. “You do what you have to do and pay the price,” Slack says. “I paint houses. It’s honest work. If I were in New York, I would be driving a taxi or waiting tables.
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