Friday, October 25th, 2002

New York City native Jonathan Santlofer has been known primarily as an artist. He has had over one hundred solo and group exhibitions. He was first known as an abstract painter, but after a gallery fire in Chicago destroyed five years of his work, he retreated to Rome where he spent time looking at Renaissance and Baroque art, drawing, and began to write fiction as a form of creative release. Almost five years after the fire, he returned to the art scene with figurative work -- a series of 100 carved and painted relief portraits of famous artists against detailed
replicas of that particular artist's famous artwork. These fascinating hybrid pieces mixed not only painting and sculpture, but image and
content.

The renowned painter makes his literary debut with The Death Artist (Morrow, hd. 24.95), a sophisticated and macabre thriller about a former NYPD officer turned artist who returns to her dark past when a series of gruesome, ritualistic murders rock the local art scene.