Lauren Levine: To The Sounds Wide Open With Eyes That Listen
An interminable drumming sometimes is our only company; rapping on the ledge with us window pane passengers, we hear the rumbling place our fingers step paced, but where is the ultimate destination? Who is driving us and what is the meaning? For some such as Lauren Levine, a veteran of drawing and painting, a part of life’s locomotion burns with the fuel of art and expression. In her worlds of swirling color, we see abstractions both interstellar and microcosmic; a fitting puzzle piece, and what we find where we’ve landed, in that moment the beat drops. Here we hear:
T: So why don't you tell me about—introduce yourself. Who are you, where are you and what are you doing?
L: Alright, well, I'm Lauren Levine. I'm a painter and I've been living in Boston for many years...in Jamaica Plain, specifically for over twenty six years. And a few years ago, I moved to Needham, which is a suburb. Very strange to me. It's a lot quieter when the leaf blowers aren't going.
T: Kind of away from the provincial Boston now, huh?
L: Yeah, yeah. It's probably been a blessing over this last year to not be in the city. So I'm a painter. I primarily use oils and I tend to work, as we discussed, on a larger scale. I do some smaller work as well and I do a lot of charcoal drawing.
T: What have you been up to today? Have you done any art so far?
L: I've been in the studio today. Unfortunately, I haven't actually gotten my hands into any paint yet. I had a full day. On Wednesdays, I have an art MBA class that I do. It's not a formal degree program, but it's a business course for artists. I had a studio visit with an old friend from MassArt. She came by for a short, masked studio visit. So I haven't had a chance to actually make anything yet, but I have spent a good amount of time looking at what I've got going on and trying to open myself up to where it's going next, you know? There's a lot of looking involved.
T: Are trying to find something that you're aiming for in the near future? It feels like you're on an exploratory path.
L: Yeah. I mean, I don't have anything specific in mind, but I know that with one particular piece that I'm working on right now, there's some challenges, and I've changed up a little bit of my process with this piece. I work almost exclusively in oil paint, and I decided spontaneously to grab a few bottles of really cheap acrylic paints two weeks ago in just a few colors and decided to do the painting on a large piece in acrylic, which I haven't done—I haven't played with acrylics in years. I created a different surface to start from, so now I'm sort of trying to integrate and figure out how to kind of bridge the acrylic to the oil.
T: At the very least, that sounds fun, to be sure.
L: I'm trying to push things a little bit and push myself to solve something...I use the word problems, but I don't mean problems like a math problem, like when you solve a math problem. It's not like that. It's kind of just trying to investigate what's going on.
Studio Cloth.
T: When did art become a pivotal aspect of your life?
L: I think that I've always done it and it's always been important to me. I do remember drawing as far back as I can remember into my childhood, and that was something I always did, I always drew. I don't know if I painted so much as a kid, but I could always just sit down with a coloring book and draw. I tell this a lot: I remember being on the floor with my mother as a very young child, probably about the age my son is now. I was sitting on the floor with a coloring book with my mother and watching the way that she would use the crayons to do an outline and shade it in perfectly and I would be drawing pictures on the other page in the margins. That's one of my earliest memories of anything art-related.
T: Did your parents have any background in art?
L: Not really. My mother has off-and-on decided to pick up drawing or painting. She does it from time to time. I think she has an aptitude for it, but it's never been something that she's committed herself to. My father, no, as far as I know. My mother's sister paints. She used to, at least. My sister, she's an artist. So I think that was actually a pretty big influence on me because she's nine years older than I am. When she was in high school, she would come home and I remember her bringing home what, to me, were huge paintings. To me they seemed kind of crazy and abstract and very thickly painted. I think I assumed that they were oil paintings. I'm not sure if they were acrylic, but I remember seeing them and being kind of blown away by what she was doing. And then she went to art school at MassArt. I would visit her painting studios and all that. As I got into high school, I think that's when I felt more committed to art as just what I do. I started doing, what was for me in high school, large paintings like twenty-four-by-thirty-six canvases and I had access to lots of paint and lots of tools and I experimented a lot and had a really great teacher who encouraged a lot of experimentation. There was never any question in my mind that I was going to go to art school after high school. And that was it. That was all I wanted to do.
T: And that was Brockton High School, right?
L: That was Brockton High School. Mr. Allen was my teacher.
T: Is he still out there?
L: He's retired from teaching and I think he moved somewhere. He might be down the Cape. I'm not sure.
T: That's a nice place to be. Very tranquil.
L: He would work on his paintings in the classroom, too. There are huge art rooms there. He would have a very large canvas that he would be working on, something like a five-by-five foot canvas on an easel by his desk that he would get to work on when he could.
T: A real artist teaching art.
L: Yeah. He would even have us a model for each other. We would take turns modeling for the class. So we got in some real figure drawing.
T: So in high school your abilities were definitely nurtured and you were pointed in the direction of going to art school. And that was at?
L: I went to MassArt.
T: MassArt. That's in Boston and you go on to be living in Boston for a while. Did you go straight from school to living in Boston.
L: Yeah, well, I commuted for a year.
T: How do you think your experience at MassArt enhanced you as an artist?
L: Oh, God, that's a big question just because there's so much. I love that place, being in an environment where art was everything. It was the focus to a fault.
T: I would love to know exactly what you mean by that.
L: At the time that I was going to school, there was absolutely no emphasis in the program I was in on the business of art and about how to create a career as an artist. It was very much the vibe reinforcing the idea that you make your art and money is dirty. There was a feeling of, you know, the sellouts and that sort of thing, the whole mythology, you know, that if you're actually having a successful career as an artist, then you're selling out or something like that. So there wasn't any emphasis put on, "okay, what do you do once you get out of art school?" if you weren't someone who was on an academic track, which I was not, from undergrad to grad school to becoming a professor or something. As far as I was concerned, you go to art school and then you waitress and make art on the side. But, you know, that was a bigger problem. That wasn't just my school. That was sort of the mind set across the board. Aside from that, I mean, MassArt was a great experience. I was able to have an art studio and we had great teachers. We had regular critiques. There's a lot to explore there. I got to get into some 3-D stuff like glass and foundry, and printmaking, too, which I love. I learned so much about painting there..
T: Are there any professors or administrators that you would like to shout out right now, give them a little nod?
L: Well, yeah. I mean, my teacher was Dan Kelleher, and he was incredible. I loved that guy, but he retired right before my senior year. He actually passed away a couple of years ago.
T: Oh, I'm sorry.
L: Yeah. So that was a bummer, but he had a long life. He was wonderful.
T: What were some of your influences at that time?
L: You mean other artists that I looked to and that I loved in that time? At that time, one of my biggest influences was Egon Schiele. I did almost exclusively figurative work back then and I was so influenced by him that I was trying to draw like him. I still love him, although I don't try to draw like him anymore. And then I think my next deepest love and influence became Jackson Pollock and that created a fundamental shift in how I approached work. I went from doing entirely figurative work to doing much more abstracting in the process of painting and came up with a lot more anthropomorphic shapes. I moved into rolling out much larger pieces of canvas, much like he did. I fell in love with all of the abstract expressionists and they're probably still my biggest influence to this day. There's so many of them.
T: There are so many of them.
L: I think the ones that come to mind the most are, of course, Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell and Franz Kline and Motherwell and De Kooning.
T: I just watched a video by Vice or something on YouTube about them. I don't remember the exact topic but it allowed me to become acquainted with more than Jackson Pollock. I know that group now.
L: There's a really amazing book that came out a couple of years ago. I actually just finished it finally. It’s called Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel. It's a big, thick book. It's all about the first generation and second generation of abstract painters specifically focusing on the woman painters. Lee Krasner, Grace Hartigan, Elaine de Kooning, Joan MItchell, Helen Frankenthaller. Anyway, it's an incredibly detailed account, not just of them in their own lives, but of everyone around them, and it puts them in context. It's almost like a novel. It's wonderfully written. I think you might like it if you're interested in that group.
T: I would like to arm myself with a little bit of that knowledge. I want to talk about your experience once you're outside of college. Where did you have your sights set, what were your next couple of career moves that you were thinking about? What kind of opportunities came up for you at that time?
L: That's a tough one. I would show locally at small shops. There were, you know, different groups of artists and curators that I would work with and they’d ask for me to be in shows with and that sort of thing. I didn't have any idea how to move beyond that. So that's a lot of how my early years went after school. I just always worked my jobs and I painted when I could and I bought the materials I could. I always had a studio in my apartment so I didn't have to go anywhere; whenever I had time, I could just paint.
T: I think that is awesome. I definitely romanticize the idea that, you know, there's this place at the end of the day, you can retreat to and what you really love is there at home and you get to work with it and interact with it.
L: Yeah, I was in love with the romance of it. The reality of that lifestyle isn't easy or as beautiful as the romanticized vision of it.
T: You must've had a decent network of other artists at the time of you leaving MassArt. Am I correct with that?
L: Somewhat. I mean, I knew the people I went to school with.
T: Were you interacting with them and creating like a network outside of school within the art scene in Boston?
L: To some extent, yeah. I probably wanted to be a bigger scenester than I was. I mean, it's going to sound incredibly boring but I really spent a lot of time with small groups of friends. We did some pop-up shows before they were called pop-up shows. We hung out and made art together and watched a lot of Star Trek or went to the beach together. You know, it was just life. I didn't get involved in any startup galleries or anything like that. I knew people who were doing that, but I didn't get involved at, like, an administrative level.
T: Was there a person or an event that was like the catalyst for shifting into a different role in art for you where you were getting closer to where you are nowadays? Was there something that triggered that change?
L: Yeah, I think about 10, 12 years ago, so like my mid-thirties, I had decided to stop working just jobs when I was in my late 20s coming up as I started to get closer to 30 and I decided to get an actual career that I felt like I could be happier in and make a living to support my artwork. So I went to school to become a muscular therapist. I did that and then started working full time in that field and realized that while I did enjoy it, I really had to fight for time and energy to put into making any art. So it became a much stronger drive, I think, at that point, because I knew that's what I wanted to be doing. But, like I said, I had to really fight for the time and energy to focus on my work. I started showing them a lot more. I started making more connections, I think, right around, like, the birth of the online social world which feels like it was forever ago now, but it really wasn't.
T: I don't like to think that it was a long time ago [laughs].
L: When that started, I just remember finding out about Myspace, getting on and connecting with people who I hadn't talked to in years. I still kind of miss Myspace. It was more fun. I had a little Bender robot as my cursor and had lots of music. It was a fun space to be on.
T: It was really cool.
L: I think that social media has played a huge role because I've been able to—well, this is a new thing, though. I've been able to connect with so many people in so many places over the last several years. You get to see so much art, get to connect with people who you would never have any connection to otherwise. All of a sudden, you know, you're having conversations with them on Instagram like you're old friends. Another really pivotal thing for me was having my son five years ago. I've become more productive. The quality of my work has jumped and my commitment to my work has increased so much over the last five years. Once you have a kid, you find out how much sleep you can actually survive on and how much time you actually had on a daily basis before. I've gotten really good at utilizing the small amount of time that I have. It used to be that if I had a whole day off from work to paint and made no plans, it was sort of intimidating and I would spend most of the day kind of putzing around. You know, go and make another cup of tea, decide to put on a Law and Order marathon. I would have hours and hours and I wouldn't get a whole lot done. Now if I have an hour, I walk in and I start working. I have everything written down like, "this is what I need to get done this week or this day.”
T: That would be somewhat of a muse, like a secret muse. Not something that you're painting about, but in the in the background for you, it's what's motivating you to—
L: More like a driver with a whip [laughs]. No, it's inspiring. I want to do things better, faster. So I've deepened my practice and I've opened my focus...I mean, my focus is pretty tight on the work, but it's also, you know, learning to take it seriously as a business and utilizing resources to make that happen.
T: There's no denying you take your art seriously. I see you post new work all the time. You also frequently share content of other artists or content relating to art. With the networking that you've done in mind and the contributions to informative discourse, do you think within the art community your role is more than solely that of an artist?
L: I hope so. I feel like there's such a broad and deep community of artists that I'm connected to now and I love when I can connect to other people who are connected to one another.
T: I saw something you posted that they're opening that museum in Brockton.
L: A friend of mine from college posted that and tagged me in it. He suggested that they acquired one of my pieces which was lovely.
T: Wow, that's awesome.
L: Yeah. I think I'm going to have to go down there and take a peek. It sounds like they’re doing the stuff that I had hoped they would always do, investing in the arts and creating space for artists. I actually don't know what I'm contributing specifically, but I do know that I have joined communities that others are starting and I'm trying to become more connected and be more active. I joined a crit group. I joined a business for artist's group. I joined a couple of other online spaces for artists. This last year with COVID has had a lot of silver linings for my practice. I've been signing up for online roundtable discussions and workshops and seminars and all kinds of stuff online so much more than I would have done in person. I mean I've become much more of a joiner than I ever have been.
T: Would you say that it is key for a prospective artist to get as mixed into everything as they can be?
L: I think absolutely. I think you want to be a part of a much larger community. I think we isolate so much in our studios that it's hard for us to come out and be social unless you're going to an opening where there's free snacks in line and we're not getting that right now. So we have to kind of get our social connections online. But I'm finding that community is so important and the word networking is one of those terms that has been taken out of just like the business world's language and been applied to everything, including the art world. That terminology can be a little bit of a turnoff or can be intimidating, I think, because the idea of networking sounds outside of our scope. But really it's just all about authentically building connections and friendships and community. And I didn't really understand how to do that as effectively. I'm starting to get it. I wish I'd gotten it 20 years ago on this level. I wasn't thinking in those terms then.
T: With social media, online presence has definitely aided in how quickly the frequency of those kinds of groups can collaborate and speak up.
L: I know. I was just attending a roundtable discussion the other day that was hosted by a woman who runs a group in Australia and the people in Australia, in the UK and in the States were all on this roundtable discussion at the same time.
T: That feels like such a special thing to be a part of.
L: It just wouldn't have been possible. Well, it was possible before the last year, but no one was doing it.
T: The meeting of the minds. It seems like such a valuable thing to get insight from outside your community, outside of the whole country and in different countries.
L: It was awesome.
T: I noticed on your Instagram that you won the Crit Lab grant. What is that and what does that mean for you?
L: Yes, I did! The Crit Lab is a NY based crit group which, in pre covid times, met in person in different areas to share work and engage in monthly full day grad level critiques and discussions on one another’s work. It was founded by an artist named Patricia Miranda. This last year it’s been entirely online, sharing our work digitally rather than bringing the physical work to a location. A friend who’s been with the group for some time had been telling me about it, suggesting it would be a good resource for me. Then she told me they had launched their first Fellowship opportunity for 2021 so I applied and was awarded the Fellowship, which has turned out to be an even greater gift than I imagined. Because the groups are online this season, I was able to connect with artists from all over New England rather than being restricted by location. It’s been a really great experience and an important catalyst in what I'm doing right now in the studio. I'm seeing things through different eyes. I’m more conscious of what I'm doing in specific areas and where I want to take it, or as we talked about in the beginning, with having a level of purpose, with certain investigations that maybe felt I knew were there, but I couldn't articulate them. And so having this wonderful group of artists who look at the work and articulate their responses to what they see happening, I think is critical to the development of any artist's work. It is for me.
T: I think that's fascinating. I think that will speak so true and clear to artists. And it's interesting, too, this relationship between the narrative and the visual at the same time and what's motivating these the things that you think in terms of words which will end up really putting the image out for you. Shakespeare wrote in one of his sonnets "learn to read what silent love hath writ, to hear with eyes belongs to love fine wit." Basically: you can hear with your eyes and you can see with your ears. I think it's true with most things and the more educated you are, the more vernacular you acquire from your community and your craft, the more clearly your senses will behave when you interact with the medium. I think any artist would be strengthened and fortified by what you've cultivated here by participating in the Crit Lab and other groups. Through these interactions, what is something in the near future that you would consider a very gratifying contribution, either to yourself or others?
L: That's a hard one to answer. I don't have a quick, easy answer for that. This is where I'm glad it's not a podcast and you have like 20 minutes of dead air. I think I want the work to have impact, I want it to. I want to be able to make things that have their own life, that have their own vitality. I would love for people to like them. That would be wonderful, of course, but that's not why I'm making them. When I think about the work that I love that has been around for decades, centuries, millennia, it contributes something to the world that nothing else can. That's hard to nail down in some cases. It might be as simple as something pretty but it's something much more than that, and I think it speaks to something in the human experience of the world that is unique and that looks for enrichment and looks for a deepening of our understanding or experience of the world, of our own existence. So I think ultimately I'd like to contribute to that conversation. Yeah, I hope that I make something that withstands or contributes in some way positively. I'm not sure what that would be. I think all I can do is focus right now on trying to make better work. In doing so, that means continuing to look at what everyone else is doing so that I can be in a conscious conversation with and to examine what I'm doing...not over-examine. You can't do it while you're making it or it kills the moment. It kills the stroke. But in a reflective way. You know, in a way to become more articulate and conscious of what I'm making when I'm in that more intuitive space. There's a lot of words. I don't know if I've said anything.
T: No, I think when that goes to print, it's going to be one of the most beautiful remarks, especially about art that I could ever hope to have gleaned from this conversation. So thank you so much for that note. That was absolutely excellent. I couldn't ask for a better sense of the nature of more than just art, but innovation to the human experience. My next question is, what are you working on this week? I see the paintings behind you. Are they in a series or are those standalone works?
L: Well, I don't tend to work in series. In order to work in series, I think you have to have an idea and there are a series of my work, then it's more that I can look back at the work and group them chronologically. I don't work from a specific idea, you know? What I'm really focused on, as you as you see, I'm working on a lot of large pieces. I've upped my size, so it feels more immersive. I feel like the scale is giving me more of an opportunity to have a stronger physicality with the work, to have larger marks, to use a lot more paint. I'm also working on smaller pieces as well, which is difficult in some ways because it feels restrained when I take a canvas and I shrink it way down to something you can hold in your hands like an object. There's sort of a preciousness to it the way there is with drawing. So on the canvas, I'm working out problems on the small ones that I'm having on the large ones. Whether it's color combinations or mark making or how to handle the space in a general way, that sort of stuff. So they're often very quick and free, and I'm also doing work on paper. I got some Arches oil paper that I've been working with which is really nice because it's very much like the handmade printmaking papers, but it's made to withstand oil paint. So those are wonderful because I feel more like I'm drawing with paint and that was something that my old instructor that we mentioned earlier, Dan Kelleher, he talked a lot to me about drawings with paint. That's stuck with me my entire life, and I feel like I'm finally starting to learn how to do it. I spent a good part of this year leading up to it...probably the last couple of years working on charcoal drawing and a lot of work on paper with charcoal.
T: As you've joined these groups, do you see more viewership in your work?
L: I'm not sure. I mean, there is more, yes, but I don't know if it's... correlation is not causation, right? So it's correlative, but I don't know how much joining the groups specifically has increased viewership. But I think joining the groups has changed my mindset and my outlook and my approach to how I utilize my online space and whether that's my website or my Instagram account or whatever. So that's influenced that viewership on some levels I'm sure. I've also been putting my work out there a lot more this last year. I've entered more open calls than I ever have. I started applying for grants and scholarships. I've gotten into some online shows with New York-based galleries so that is very exciting. So I've definitely been connecting with a lot more people and a lot more institutions and a lot more artists, curators and all of that. So I think all of these things contribute to increasing viewership.
T: Has COVID brought any emotions out and onto the canvas or onto paper?
L: Well, before the pandemic, I was intensely impacted by the wildfires that were happening in California and that was making it directly onto the canvas. I wasn't consciously trying to put it there, but it was ending up there in very ugly ways that I could see right away. It was very interesting because I look back and ask "how did I not see that I was painting a burning forest and have no idea that was what I was doing?" So that was a very direct relationship. Then with COVID, I haven't made any paintings about it. I think in the beginning, there was sort of an intense fear simultaneous with sort of a disbelief that this was happening, and, people might hate me saying this, but also an enormous amount of joy at being able to stay home with my family, to have us all together every day yet and not to go to a job.
T: I'll help you out and say I know exactly how you feel.
L: I think a lot of us felt that way. Yeah. So basically as long as the sickness wasn't impacting you or your loved ones directly, it was a really great time for a while. But I've noticed that in the last year, I've developed a very keen awareness of my own mortality. I don't think there's any way that any of those emotions have not impacted the work I'm making but I couldn't draw direct, you know, an "ABC" line for you as to how it changed the work. I just know that it has. I'm not thinking about painting about a thing, yeah, and when I'm working, it's a very visceral experience, it's emotional and it's physical.
T: What is your process when making decisions on the canvas whether it be the composition, the paint, the figures and the lines?
L: Well, I'm thinking about creating a certain amount of tension visually on the surface, so they're very much based on movement and where your eyes travel. If I've got something that's too flowing all around, then I might just put a giant diagonal line through it to break it. I'm often stopping and stepping back and looking at what's there and trying to listen to it telling me what the next step is, what it needs, where it wants to go now. Does it need something to be pushed back in space or does something want to come forward and do something? That's sort of what I'm thinking and feeling and looking at and listening for that. We talked about listening with your eyes. That's perfect.
T: I think life provides us with a lot of abstractions, things that we're not physically seeing but they have that same impact on us as something that might cut us or have us flow or break. I think possessing that unfiltered, unadulterated engagement with your artwork like you have brings out the exact visualizations of those abstractions and their actions. I think your style exemplifies that. I can't stop looking at that painting behind you, I'm so captivated by it. That orange says so much. The white space, the reddish yellow, it all says a lot. That purple is big and loud. I just love that.
L: That's great to hear. Thank you for talking about it. It's hard to put these things into words and it really is about having an internal response and I'm glad you're having such a strong positive response to that.
T: I mean, I follow you on Instagram. I see what you post and it catches my eye every time. Sometimes even it's just a little collection of paint on the canvas but I see that you know when to capture a visual which you can feel all the texture of it. That's something my art teacher in high school really got me to see, that there's more to just flat, two dimensional compositions. Sometimes you have to really look at the experience of it, the way it got collected. It's not happening before your eyes, but you know that there's a story of why that is the way it is. When an individual really considers the craft, the significance of a piece becomes clear. You're without a doubt obviously in tune with that. Your language is that of an artist.
L: I was just talking to someone about this recently because they were saying "I like your work a lot. I really like art, but I don't really know a lot about it. I don't really understand it." And I talk with them about it because I feel like we're set up to think we are supposed to understand it on a conscious verbal level. and there is usefulness in that. But when I'm making something, it's a much more intuitive and spontaneous process of making that, not to say that I'm not stopping and thinking and looking and deciding and all of those things based on years of experience, but it's a direct communication from me through this painting to anyone who looks at it. It's so much more direct than all these words I'm trying to find. So when someone looks at a painting, they're having an immediate direct response to it, whether it's positive or negative or neither. Whether it's, you know, in the eyes or in the mind or in the heart or wherever it is in their body, in their left toe, they're having some sort of response to it and the longer you stay, the more complex that response becomes. And the longer and longer you stay, the more you start to embody and understand that, but that doesn't mean you have to be able to talk about it as it were. I think that that's where people shut themselves off from the experience because they think they're supposed to feel something or they're supposed to say something when they look at work. It's for everybody. I always go back to thinking about, you know, the earliest cave paintings, what people were doing. You mentioned innovation. That's huge, right? Yeah, go into a cave at night with some pigments, blow around your hand on the wall and draw the animals. Incredible, these animals. We're still looking at them and we're still being communicated to and we're still getting emotional responses.
With lights on, a hearty food-for-thought is revealed. Life’s sprawling solid table top is as long as fables. The guest list is enormous. Where we arrived today, we obtained a fortune for sharing; a wealth of insight from someone keen and honored. Lauren manipulates her craft to communicate like constellations. Her work is ageless and moving and she takes the viewer both inward and across the galaxy. When you get a moment, where will you find this image takes you?
