College of Staten Island hosts 'Arthur Levine: Paintings and ...

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST'Arthur Levine: Paintings and Drawings'
an art exhibit up through April 28, 2012

Where: College of Staten Island Gallery, Center for the Arts 2800 Victory Blvd., Willowbrook; www.library.csi.cuny/edu/artgallery

When: Monday to Thursday, noon to 4 p.m; Saturday, noon to 3 p.m.

How much: Admission is free.

STATEN ISLAND, NY -- As one-man shows go, ?Arthur Levine: Paintings and Drawings,? up this month at the College of Staten Island Gallery, isn?t broad, although it is deep.

The artist, a painter for 50-plus years now, is happy investigating a six-item to-do list: Ships, planes and castles, sea, sky and earth.

It gives him plenty of options. His modest-sized pictures are deceptively wide windows on a private realm of interactions and colorful dramas, space and light.

Levine is painter of some note. He is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago and Walker Art Center.

In a show of drawings and paintings, he comes off as two artists. One is a draftsman who draws very precisely from nature; the other a painter (acrylic on wood panel) with abstract expressionist tendencies and a predilection for imaginative, emotional presentations rather than real ones.

In his world of mostly European vistas, romantic chateaus cruise the dark countryside like battleships, and battleships, so bright they appear to be lit from within, ride seas so dark they almost look solid.

The surface of the paintings may well be more interesting than the subject matter. It?s a matter of textured layers with a intertwined patterns, strokes and colors. The palette is lush, saturated, almost gaudy at times.

In one small (8x13-inch) piece, ?Airplane? (1986), a small, gray vintage aircraft floats in an atmosphere made of jeweled dust motes, so bright with color and movement, it almost scintillates.

Elsewhere, a sky (or the sea) might have stretches of darkness alternating with flashes of light and bursts of colored. Lush, gilded greens pulse overhead in ?A Russian Buoy Tender.? Some Levine skies bring the first line of novelist Thomas Pyncheon?s ?The Crying of Lot 49? to mind: A screaming came across the sky.

The artist has a long history at CSI. He established the school?s original art department ? he was the sole faculty member ? in 1967, at the former Richmond College in St. George.

His fascination with boats and sea-going started nearly 20 years earlier. It was 1950 and he was crossing the Atlantic aboard the original HMS Queen Elizabeth.

?There was an announcement that in 20 minutes we?d be passing the Queen Mary (another liner),? he recalled last week. ?So, sure enough in a little while, I could see a dot on the horizon that got larger and larger.?

What he liked about ships, and later, castles, he came to realize, ?was the way the form builds up, to the funnel or the towers. It reminds me of a Rembrandt, the way the image builds to the apex. That?s the formal idea.?

Boats became too much of a good thing, eventually. ?I was getting fidgety and edgy, maybe it was too many boats,? the painter said last week.

Other imagery, planes and castles, began to recommend itself. He noticed at some point that castles inhabit the landscape in the same way that boats occupy the sea. His ?Alcazar,? (the huge Spanish medieval complex outside Sevilla) ?steams towards us, all the way from the horizon line,? writes Patricia Baum in the brochure that accompanies the exhibition.

Much of the time, ambiguity rules. In one painting, ?A Liberator Over the Western Desert,? a bombshell is exploding in the lower part of the panel, but you have to that to see it. Otherwise it might be just a whirling little sand devil.

People aren?t part of the Levine?s world, except for one airplane painting in which vague figures, a pilot and passenger, are discernible.

It?s a strategy. With no one in the picture, there?s room for the viewer.

FLORENCE AND RED HOOK

For his paintings, Levine may use photographs and/or projections to establish imagery. Painting takes place in the studio.

Drawings happen differently. He produces them in plein air (outdoors), looking at whatever he?s drawing. In his case that could mean a hillside above Florence, a high window overlooking Red Hook in Brooklyn, someplace outside the town of Autumn, France.

No matter the location, the drawings are finely done, precise and formal, without shading. Somehow, the artist manages to suggest light hitting the walls and roofs, a difficult trick in a world without shadows.

The license exercised in the paintings is absent. The works on paper draw their power from restraint and precision.

Source: http://www.silive.com/entertainment/arts/index.ssf/2012/03/arthur_levine_paintings_and_dr.html

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