Erik Slutsky's Menorah

Montreal-based artist Erik Slutsky is not a religious man, but viewers of his paintings might be tempted to jump to a different conclusion.

Many of his paintings prominently feature Jewish imagery: a colorful menorah, a figure clad in Jewish regalia crying a prayer to the heavens, a woman wearing a star of David necklace. Look more closely, and you will also see Christian crosses and Muslim crescents accompanying the Jewish symbols in his paintings.

Born to a secular Jewish family, Slutsky grew up attending Protestant schools, where he was just one student out of many “singing nice little hymns every morning, and prayers and stuff like that.”

“I come from a totally non-religious background,” he says. “My family history is much stronger in socialist and communist causes than anything else.”

The tension between the Protestant setting of Slutsky’s schooling and the minority status bestowed on him by his secular Jewish background have left their mark on Slutsky. He says, “a lot of my perceptions are coming from my eleven years of being educated in Protestant institutions and being a Jew, a very small minority of us, within those institutions.”

He now identifies as an atheist, but is nevertheless drawn to religious imagery and motivated by a yearning for global healing that others might describe as spiritual.

“The basis of all my work has to do with love and the lack of love, or war and peace, or justice and injustice,” he explains. “And religion, unfortunately – or fortunately for some – plays a large role in a lot of that. So it appears in my work not because I’m religious but because it’s all around me.”

It is no surprise then that Slutsky’s childhood yielded a questioning attitude toward organized religion in his adulthood. He says, “Yes – I was born Jewish, and I’m constantly questioning it, but I’m also constantly questioning all the religions, because if you look in my work, I often mix Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, [and] other religions … because I question the need or the relevance of any of the religions.”

But despite his skepticism of religion, Slutsky’s artistic engagement with the pervasive presence of religion in global life is not merely an intellectual exercise. There is something very personal to it.

Slutsky describes the personal meaning of his painting Shmah, which depicts a Jewish figure praying Shmah Israel while flanked on either side by Muslim and Christian places of worship – a prayer that Slutsky himself sometimes uses: “Even though I said I’m an atheist, we all have times in our lives when we pray for something because something so bad has happened or we want something good to happen, and we think, oh, I don’t know, I’m gonna say this prayer, I don’t know why, it’s like a meditative thing, and it’s a prayer I use whenever I want good luck for someone or I want something good to happen. And this guy [in the painting] is kind of sending it up into the air. At the same time I really like the imagery of the Hebrew letters, which are so beautiful. And putting the three major world religions together at the same time, I guess it’s my endless hope of unity amongst people.”

Perhaps artistic expression could be thought of as Slutsky’s personal, creative, socially engaged – and atheistic – form of religion. The open posture that an artist takes as his art spills out of him can be seen as almost mystical, as in Slutsky’s explanation of the dragon-like figures that appear in Menorah and Shmah: “Those began as spontaneous movements of my hand and brush and paint on paper on canvas. I never had any intention when I first began creating those serpent-like images … of them being anything in particular. I closed my eyes, filled my brush with paint, and just splashed them down on the paper or the canvas.”

And in the human process of coming to terms with human disregard, violence, and hatred in the world, both art and religion can provide outlets for pain and confusion, and can explore the ethical questions of how to transmute the world’s suffering and divisions into love, harmony, and unity. Slutsky’s art is so compassionately engaged with the world that, although Slutsky is an atheist, it tenaciously wrestles with such ethical questions through the language of religions to which he has no formal tie, and there seems to be nothing he can do either to stop or understand the prayers for peace that seem to erupt in him from time to time.