Jonathan santlofer biography

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He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree at Boston University, Boston, MA. He returned to New York to earn his Master of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. ... "I had walked out of the room briefly to go into the back of our loft, to my studio, and when I came back, it was not that much later, but my wife was in incredible distress."

Joy died suddenly — possibly from medications interacting badly — and Santlofer was left in what he calls a "fugue state" of grief.

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Interview Highlights

On trying to find out the cause of Joy's death

It was very odd, because I could not get the autopsy. ... Then they said, "Well, it was never done." "It was lost." And that took almost two years for me to get the autopsy, and basically when I got the autopsy and read it, there was no cause of death listed at all, which was the shocking thing.

He was long considered an abstract painter. Those were the things that I had a lot of trouble doing.

This was a book my wife worked on for four or five years, and it really was her life's work and it just had to be published. I just wasn't looking at things or I was concentrating so hard [on] being kind of normal and regular and presenting that face to the world that I sort of turned off another part of myself.

I think it's a sort of natural place to go when you have a loss, someplace to put your feelings and I think that's what I did with drawing.

On a string of injuries after his wife's death, such as breaking his nose and foot

One could say that, "Well, these things happen," but they just kept happening for the first year, year and a half or two after my wife died.

I did all sorts of work. His stories appear in numerous collections, including The Rich & the Dead, edited by Nelson De Mille, New Jersey Noir, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, Lawrence Block’s two bestselling anthologies, In Sunlight and In Shadow and Alive In Form and Color. He recently created and edited The New York Times “Notable Book,” It Occurs To Me that I Am America, a collection of original work by more than 50 of today’s best known authors and artists.

A fascinating hybrid is created where image and content integrate fully, where everything in a piece works in unison.

In the numerous articles and reviews, Santlofer's work is described as dramatic, supercharged, lush, and witty; creating its own synthesis of modernism, combining traces of Van Gogh, Matisse, Cubism, Futurism, and Expressionism.

Drawing is something that comes very naturally to me, and I've been drawing since I was a kid. People tell me all the time that they read it and that makes me very happy. I tried to do some editing on it, which the publisher asked, [but it] was impossible. Over the course of about 80 drawings, he found that his sketches brought him back in time, to the moment when the photographs were originally taken.

It was published to quite a bit of acclaim and got a James Beard nomination. I couldn't bear to cut anything.