ARTIST

Alexandria Levin

Biography

Alexandria Levin has exhibited her oil paintings in galleries, museums and cultural centers across the country since 1981, including nine solo shows. Her paintings are in private collections from Boston to Japan, as well as in the state of New Mexico's Capitol Art Collection in Santa Fe. She has lectured on her art in the San Francisco Bay Area, Philadelphia and Tokyo, and has been awarded major state grants in California and Massachusetts. Ms. Levin attended Massachusetts College of Art to study painting for two years and later returned to school at the San Francisco Art Institute where she received a BFA with honors in 1989. She also studied drawing with noted portrait artist Leo Neufeld in 1997.

As a child growing up in New York City, all Alexandria ever wanted was a steady flow of art supplies. She began painting thirty years ago, and has created three strong, distinct bodies of work since. Her earliest work was influenced by Rousseau, Gauguin, O'Keeffe and the early punk rock scene in Boston. These works were darkly colorful, playfully nightmarish, melancholy and full of symbolism. After moving to California her art was visually influenced by the coastal architecture, exotic plant life, and a quality of light that doesn't exist in the east, as well as impressions from her travels to Mexico, Guatemala, Japan, Hawaii and New Mexico.

Painting has always been a means of story-telling about her life, illustrating her dreams and portraying observations of the world around her. Her natural inclination to allegorical, narrative work has continued to deepen over time. Twenty years of figurative work gave way to birds, fish and other animals for a while, and then to anthropomorphic still-lifes; a long series that she is still exploring. Strong drafting ability combined with a vibrant sense of color and composition, and her innate surrealist sensibility from earlier periods, make her paintings a unique and integral part of the current resurgence in representational art.

Alexandria is currently living and painting in Philadelphia, and has recently written and published two books on the arts and creativity. She occasionally writes informative articles for artists, and teaches painting and drawing. She is also working on two collections of poetry and song lyrics.