Michael Levin

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work comes out of a playful, iterative drawing practice guided by impulse, humor and accident. For the last few years, I have most enjoyed working with a small group of visual elements: pears, candlesticks, a challah, a kitchen table and chairs. Each of them emerged in a strange sequence from a highly repetitive practice of sketching in pen in a small notebook. Under the sway of chance variations, unconscious desires, and intentional choices, these elements mature with each successive bit of work. They change internally and also in relation to one another, like members of a family. As they change, I feel them approaching truths that I can’t verbalize. They point backwards and forwards simultaneously. Backwards to the deepest recesses of my memory, forwards to some waiting revelation, full of promise.

Interview with Michael Levin

Can you tell us a bit about your background and how you became interested in becoming an artist? Who or what were some of your most important early influences?

I grew up in Los Angeles in the 80s and 90s. If you’ve seen Curb Your Enthusiasm, that’s pretty much exactly the where and the how of my background, just a decade or two earlier. Jewish but not religious, Hollywood liberal, beautiful surroundings but also lots of angst and interpersonal tsurris. I’ve been drawing pretty much constantly for as long as I can remember. Art as an institutional thing was always pretty remote to me, but, being in LA, the entertainment industry was really present. That shaped my sense of what avenues creativity flowed through, so a lot of my early drawing was directed towards animation, comics, movie concepts and things like that. It wasn’t until after college that I started to become excited about art in a more traditional sense.

Where are you currently based and what initially attracted you to working in this place? Are there any aspects of this specific location or community that have inspired aspects of your work?

I’ve been based in Brooklyn for about 15 years now. What initially attracted me here was the really incredible creative ferment here in the mid-2000’s. As a 20 year old coming here, I was just swept away by it. Everyone I knew was an artist, poet or musician. Frankly, it was my introduction to “artist” as a professional identity one could claim independently, just because they liked to draw or paint or sculpt. I learned a lot in my first few years here about what uses drawing could be put to. Many of those were shaped not just by proximity to the art world, but by Brooklyn as a place with its own historical and cultural reality. My first serious project was a book of drawings and a series of ink and gouache paintings exploring the dress codes of orthodox Jews. The last orthodox members of my family were in my great grandparents generation, but in Brooklyn that lifestyle isn’t in the past at all. I was so struck by that, and making art became my way of making sense of it. I later went to graduate school here, getting my MFA in Printmaking at Pratt, and that community remains a big part of my creative and personal life.

Can you describe your studio space? What are some of the most crucial aspects of a studio that make it functional? Do any of these specific aspects directly affect your work?

I work out of a 12’x9’ basement studio in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. What it doesn’t have is natural light. It does have lots of peace and quiet, though. I love being alone when I work. Aside from walls and tables to work on (I have two tables, a spring loaded drafting table that almost took my eye out once, and a two-tiered plywood work bench on trestles that doubles as a flat file), the promise of solitude is probably the most important aspect of the space to me. That’s especially true as a parent of small kids in a pandemic.

What is a typical day like? If you don't have a typical day, what is an ideal day?

Wake up at 6. Make breakfast for my family. Drop my older daughter off at school. Head to the studio. Paint, draw, or write for about three hours. Quick lunch. Pick my daughter up from school and bring her home. Spend the afternoon with both kids while my wife works. Make dinner. Kids bedtime (2-3 hours, oof). Hang out and talk with my wife for an hour or two. Bed before 11. As scheduled and tight as it is on when, where, and for how long, I would say it’s pretty close to an ideal. I do dream about having hours and hours in the studio, but the time limit is really healthy for someone like me, prone to perfectionism and procrastination. The afternoons and evenings with my kids, who are 1 and 5, are very fun and very intense, and the absolute center of my life. All my work relates to that time.

What gets you in a creative mindset?

Kids have a tremendous way of forcing you to confront yourself, your own limitations, what makes you uncomfortable, what brings you joy, really everything about your subjectivity.  When I sit down to work, whatever I’ve set out to do, it becomes a way of digesting what I’ve been learning about myself, where I come from, how I felt when I was the child and not the parent. My need to externalize it all again, to be able to hold it up and look at it, fires my studio practice.

What criteria do you follow for selecting materials? How long have you worked with this particular media or method?

Because I usually keep my studio sessions under a few hours, I tend to select my materials for speed and simplicity. I paint in gouache and acrylic, both of which are fast-drying and flexible. I use graphite, charcoal, and oil pastels for drawing. I’ve worked with graphite forever. I started using gouache about 15 years ago after taking a class in color theory at Parsons. The professor required that we use it and mentioned that most people really hate gouache. I think I took that as an invitation to love it. I’ve used acrylic for just a couple of years, as I’ve moved toward working on canvas and panels.

Can you walk us through your overall process? How long has this approach been a part of your practice?

My process is in a bit of flux right now, which I’m really happy about. I’ve usually started with drawing, either in pen or pencil, doodling pretty freely until I start to recognize an image taking hold. That moment of recognition is hard to describe, but it is usually about coming to identify a particular shape or action within a drawing as a familiar person, a taboo feeling or both. I’ll typically repeat that drawing dozens of times, watching how the image shifts with each iteration, mostly without my meaning it to. Elements of the composition subtly drift from one drawing to the next until I find an arrangement that makes me laugh. I tend to think of this part of the process as largely unconscious, a kind of automatism, because its dynamic force is error or accident. I often pull from these drawings to make paintings. My approach has to be flexible enough to keep that unwilled evolution of form and meaning going, or else I feel like the work is dead. More recently, the painting process has become a creative engine in its own right, and I find myself turning back to drawing now to make some sense of what’s happening in my painting. New compositions and symbols are emerging from my painting without any precedent in earlier drawings, and I’m finding that unpredictability very exciting.

Can you talk about some of the ongoing interests, imagery, and concepts that have informed your process and body of work over time? How do you anticipate your work progressing in the future?

I’ve been interested in psychoanalysis and surrealism for years, but especially since I became a parent and had my kids hold a mirror up to me. I love the way those movements approach memory. There is this idea that everything we’ve ever experienced is permanently inscribed in our unconscious, and our memory is just kind of hovering over this great subterranean sea. That’s what pulls me towards error as a tool in artmaking, because so much truth spills out of the constant small failures and accidents you make while working, just like when you’re speaking. The unconscious punches through when the more cultivated, controlled self messes up, and that’s when you’re really speaking from the heart. One of Freud’s terms for the “Freudian slip” is the “faulty performance.” I love that. That’s how your kids can be that mirror for you, because they remind you what it’s like to be totally guileless and direct, and how immediately relatable and lovable that is, even while making you want to pull your hair out. If I can anticipate anything about my work in the future, it would be that it will somehow be growing in tandem with my kids, but thankfully I have no idea what that will look like.

Do you pursue any collaborations, projects, or careers in addition to your studio practice? If so, can you tell us more about those projects, and are there connections between your studio practice and these endeavors?

I teach at Pratt in the Fine Arts department and in a really wonderful interdisciplinary program called the Pratt Integrative Courses (PIC). When the PIC program was just starting several years ago, I wrote a course for it called “Corpse Will Drink” that’s now in its seventh semester. The course explores the role of the unconscious in creative work generally, blending art history with studio work and psychoanalytic theory. It is super fun to teach. It draws students from across the institute—fashion designers, painters, filmmakers, architects—and because Pratt is so international, from around the world. I learn new things from it every time I teach it. The mix of students is always so unique and continually broadens my perspective on culture, materials, media, gender experience, everything. My studio practice has gained so much from it.

As a result of the pandemic, many artists have experienced limited access to their studios or loss of exhibitions, income, or other opportunities. Has your way of working (or not working) shifted significantly during this time? Are there unexpected insights or particular challenges you’ve experienced?

I had to shift my studio out of Brooklyn for about a year, but I don’t think it had much of an impact on my work. We had decided to visit my wife’s parents for a week in New Jersey right when the store shelves were starting to empty out in Brooklyn, fully expecting everything to blow right over. We wound up staying put for the better part of 2020, which required me to start working first out of their living room, then eventually to convert part of their basement into a studio. Throughout, they were so flexible and understanding and supported me with whatever I needed, from space to childcare. That really helped soften the blow of the transition. Not only was Brooklyn far away enough as to be functionally unreachable, my studio here is unventilated and the floor is subdivided with several other artists. I didn’t feel too comfortable working there again until early 2021, when I got my vaccine. The unexpected insight from the whole experience was both how portable and durable my practice can be, and how porous my painting is to my surroundings. I find that wherever I spend the most time, aspects of that place really quickly filter into my work. As involved as I am in reaching way back into my memory, whatever it is I recover there typically winds up visually contextualized in my current surroundings. Had I not shifted back and forth over the last couple years, I don’t expect I would have known that. And I like that responsiveness and sensitivity in the work, it’s a check on the looming solipsism of the whole thing.

Can you share some of your recent influences? Are there specific works—from visual art, literature, film, or music—that are important to you?

I’ve recently been revisiting a number of painters that I used to be either confused by or really despised when I was younger. The first one that comes to mind is Marc Chagall. I’ve been looking closely at his work from the early 1900s until about the end of the war, and it is guiding me in ways I never anticipated. As a Jewish artist Chagall was always revered in the environment I grew up in, and it always felt schlocky and sentimental and not exciting to me at all. Now I can see how revolutionary and frankly strange his approach to painting was, and I’m finding myself looking to it for answers in my own work. His painting “Window in the Country” has been a big influence recently, as has “Birth of a Child,” as radically different as they are. I was also just blown away the other day by a giant Wilfredo Lam painting called “The Eternal Present” at the Met’s amazing Surrealism exhibition. I’ve been familiar with Lam since seeing his work at MoMA probably 10 years ago, but this one took me by surprise. It was sublime, it made me feel miniscule in both a physical and spiritual sense. I’m still working it out.

Who are some contemporary artists you’re excited about? What are the best exhibitions you’ve seen in recent memory and why do they stand out?

Jenna Ransom, Raymie Iadevaia, Bruna Massadas, LJ Wallis, Marta Lee, Ethan Stuart, to name a few. Best exhibitions I’ve visited recently are “Surrealism Beyond Borders” at the Met, which is where I saw that Wilfredo Lam, Louise Bourgeois at the Jewish Museum, and Phillip Guston at Hauser and Wirth. The Met’s show is special because of its scope and ambition, overturning the racial, national and gender hierarchies that have defined Surrealism so narrowly. The work that show brings together is just astounding, and makes a lot of the big names in the movement look pretty minor by comparison. Louise Bourgeois—the show was called “Freud’s Daughter”—for its (and her) courage in grappling with the most forbidden subjects and aspects of the self. The Guston show for its freshness, even though the paintings were made 50 years ago and have all been shown before. Unfortunately the pandemic plus small kids equation has kept me from a lot of openings and gallery shows I've desperately wanted to visit, so my list is heavily weighted toward big ticket events.

Do you have any tips or advice that someone has shared with you that you have found particularly helpful?

The best two pieces of advice I’ve received invited me to rethink representation. The first was to stop using photographs as reference. It was a strategy I had come to rely on during graduate school that got increasingly constraining. The whole creative process became about finding the right source images, without which I could do nothing. Moving away from that required a more or less complete teardown of my practice. I worked exclusively in pen in a small sketchbook for about a year before I felt ready to start making larger work again. It was one of the most intensely creative periods I’ve ever had, and germinated everything I have made since. I received the second bit of advice pretty soon after the first, right before I started with the sketchbook. More than the prohibition on photographs, it gave me a positive direction, a real reason to work. At the time, I was making large scale copies of sticker book pages, often with stickers missing, which would leave these oddly shaped holes in the surface. I figured the absences were places where a viewer could project meaning, maybe even aggressive or erotic (I hoped), within these visual structures set up for kids. I was looking at a lot of Mike Kelley at the time. A friend came over and encouraged me to ditch the sticker book concept and just draw out the absences, over and over again, until I found a meaning in them for myself. That really revolutionized my drawing and is still fundamentally how I approach my work today.

What are you working on in the studio right now? What’s coming up next for you?

I’m doing a lot of painting right now experimenting with types of surfaces I’ve never used before. I’m getting ready for a show in a couple months and I want to have as much work as possible to choose from. I’ve been working a lot with sliced challahs as a visual motif, or a starting point for a composition, making them sleeping faces, or mountains, or mangled penises, or corpses, but always on a dinner table. Excited to see where they will take me.

To find out more about Michael Levin check out his Instagram and website.