Richard Levine
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Richard Levine, born in Newark, NJ is a painter and photographer whose professional career has spanned more than 30 years in the graphic arts working for prominent design firms and corporate clients. A graduate of Fairleigh Dickinson Univ., he later studied oil painting for four years with artists Alan Turner and Andrew Lattimore and photography with Gary Winogrand. Additional studies were at Cooper Union and The School of Visual Arts, NYC. Extensive travel throughout the United States, Europe and Asia have formed the foundation for his personal work. “I’m interested in exploring the harmonious effects of light, texture, shape and color and presenting these qualities in ways that evoke memory and spirit”.
Richard has exhibited widely on the East Coast from Virginia to Maine in both solo and group shows. In 2005 he won a NY State Certificate of Merit for his exhibit: India, A Traveler’s Reflections. He has done photo documentary work in the refugee camps of Darfur with the International Medical Corps and in Mississippi with Mississippi State Univ and The Annie E. Casey Foundation. In June, 2016 he won 2nd Place prize in the Bethesda Painting Awards, a juried competiition sponsored by the Trawick Foundation. He is a 2017/18 recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. His work is held in both private and public collections.
My love of travel and exploration spark the inspiration, both spiritual and visual that I derive from experiencing new landscape, people and culture which in turn invigorates my work and challenges me to both portray and understand our world. I like to paint and photograph in places where the weather, the traditions and the geography still dominate; where these elements identify and characterize a locale. Where I can still connect to what has gone before and one feels an authentic “sense of place”.
For the past several years I have been combining the abstract Color Field paintings of the Washington and New York schools with the vernacular architecture of rural New England and Nova Scotia. This has inevitably led me deeper into abstraction and I currently find my focus at the intersection of climate, culture and geology. The new work seeks to portray the evolving effects of climate change on the land caused by erosion and the movement of water and presented in a framework of indigenous culture and color. The work of Richard Diebenkorn and the poured paint techniques of the Color Field painters inspire and inform this new work.
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