Columns:: Worth Repeating

since 12/15/98

Columns::April 22, 2002

Worth repeating

Caricaturist David Levine delivered this year’s Jack Davis Lecture sponsored by the School of Art. He showed the audience slides of his oils and watercolors as well as his well-known pen-and-ink illustrations and caricatures. Some excerpts:
“I am heavily biased politically. Nevertheless, I believe that it is my role--because I am given a certain amount of power, to comment to an audience--to see it even-handedly. . . .
“I am intrigued at doing people from the back. There is a kind of rhythm that intrigues me. . . . I did many ‘ascents and descents’ using the props at the beach, the boardwalk, things happening under the boardwalk, swimmers, people in the water. They suggest the feeling that I get, that I’m painting something that went on thousands of years ago. Any population, given a hot summery day, would strip down and pretty much act the same way. . . . The involvement with the patterns and the pieces of material and so on--it’s like a quilt; there’s a quilting quality. I’m always involved and interested in the massing of people at play, where there’s irritation, there’s striving for space, there’s activity between old and young. The whole thing occurs right there in front of you. It is a battle-like scene. . . .
“I feel that I don’t see enough of life in the [artists’] shows that I see around. They’re so completely involved with themselves--the thing they respond to is the ego, being petted and stroked by the institutions and the curators, to be the original, to be the only. . . . When I say I’m a traditionalist as well as a caricaturist, I turn back to when people were discussing aspects of life. It’s up to an audience to decide whether I have done that, or whether it’s a quality that means anything to them.”

--Beth Roberts

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