For anyone tired of this winter’s monochromatic landscape (snow-filled skies above and slushy gray sidewalks below), a new show at the Sherman Gallery offers a handy antidote. Titled The Beatles Are Dull and Ordinary: Drawings by David X. Levine, it features a series of lushly colored pencil abstracts by an exceedingly talented artist.
Levine’s work is full of geometric patterns—diamonds, squares, rectangles—all rendered in brilliant shades of orange, blue, pink, green, and red. Stepping into the gallery is like walking out of a blizzard and into a greenhouse full of verdant tropical plants. Each block of color in the drawings has a subtle, mottled texture, painstakingly rendered.
Many of Levine’s works are monumental in scale—some 6 feet by 10 feet—and those larger works (and even the smaller ones) are labor-intensive, taking as long as four months to complete.
To say that his work involves “millions of pencil strokes is not hyperbole,” says show curator Rebekah A. Pierson (MET’00), College of Fine Arts director of online programs. “If you take one of these larger pieces and then focus your eye down to a mere half inch by half inch square, you can see the work as he approaches it. Almost like one pixel at a time. In that half inch square, Levine runs a Prismacolor pencil back and forth, side to side, and up and down in every direction. There is no visible stroke. He continues this process as he makes his way through the entire piece. After it’s done, about six months later, all the wax from the pencil rises to the top, and he buffs it to a shine.”
Kiss (2011) by David X. Levine, colored pencil and graphite on paper. Courtesy of Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston
Levine spent the first decade of his career as an artist working with oil paint, but found, he says, that “I wasn’t able to get the richness and intensity I could get from colored pencils.” He frequently refers to his drawings as paintings, because for him, “they do the same mysterious thing that painting does.” And despite his mastery of color, this is an artist who isn’t afraid to have lots of white space in his drawings, which serves to heighten the color he does use, as in his electrifying Kiss, with a vibrant pink lightning bolt zigzagging down a field of white.
Prior to picking up paintbrush and pencil, Levine was a poet, and poetic sensibility is evident in his use of repeated patterns. “Poetry is at the core of David’s work,” says Pierson. “In the same way you’d have difficulty describing a poem without reading it, I think his drawings are hard to describe without feeling them. They are infused with poetry.” In some cases, as in his drawing Scarecrow, lines of prose appear in the actual drawing—in this case a lyric from the 1960s British group the Watersons: “you’d love me if you could but you’re only.” In other works, she says, the connection between Levine’s drawings and poetry is more figurative. Citing his drawing Mary Brown, which includes collage (a photo of Mary Tyler Moore and Ted Knight from Moore’s eponymous 1970s groundbreaking TV comedy), Pierson says the poetry is found in the way the work “speaks through a potion of modernism and pop culture, conjuring up nostalgia, feelings about order and space, all saturated in rich color.”
Levine frequently employs sly, if somewhat esoteric references to pop culture in his drawings. Many of the titles refer to musicians, like 1960s folk singer–songwriter Fred Neil or country and pop singer–songwriter Lee Hazelwood. The exhibition’s title is taken from the drawing The Beatles Are Dull and Ordinary. Just after a 1966 Beatles interview in a London newspaper, where John Lennon famously quipped that they were “more popular than Jesus now,” the group embarked on its third US tour, and religious groups protested by burning Beatles albums—the protests were called Beatle Burnings. Levine had seen a photo of a young boy holding up a sign that read “The Beatles Are Dull and Ordinary” and it struck him as funny—the “kid obviously thinks the opposite of the sign he is holding,” he says. “There is something sad and exciting and beautiful about that, that he was forced to believe the opposite of what he really believed.”
Karin Stumpf by David X. Levine, colored pencil, collage, and graphite on paper.
Many of the New York–based artist’s drawings feature collage, which he uses to make humorous references to both high and low culture. Several of the show’s drawings pay homage to the television of his youth. And that’s not accidental. Levine cites television as a major inspiration for his more recent work. “TV’s deep influence on my work probably started with Mad Men,” he says. “Jean-Luc Godard has been the most influential artist on my work in the last decade, and I see Mad Men as the Godard of television: the show’s shot composition, lighting, use of language, timing, mixture of high and low and serious and funny, and so many more subtleties that one would usually find in the finest moviemaking. This art is the freshest art in my culture, surpassing both visual fine arts and popular music.”
Another source of inspiration for Levine? The obituaries in the New York Times. “I’ve been reading them since I was 15,” he says. They provide “an eclectic door into so many cultural personalities and events and so many of them are about unsung and underreported people. I’ve learned as much about history, science, entertainment, and art through the New York Times obituaries as I have through any other sources.” One colored pencil and collage drawing, titled Karin Stumpf, features a photograph of two actresses, Lori March and Jada Rowland, who appeared on the long-running soap opera The Secret Storm. Levine stumbled over the image, taken in the 1960s or ’70s, while reading a Times obit about March. “The specific soap opera and actresses depicted in the photo aren’t important,” he says. “It’s about aesthetic and psychological connections and their impact on the viewer.”
The Beatles Are Dull and Ordinary is a testament to how colored pencil—used by someone of Levine’s talent—can evoke color in all its vibrancy and subtlety. The show is filled with work that bears repeat viewing. Like his idol, Godard, Levine says, he aspires to create a kind of alchemy where you take images of your environment and history and “make an object that can breathe on its own,” an experience he describes as profound.
The artist (right) with Caroline Marsden, CFA senior admissions coordinator (left), and Melissa Lund, CFA financial aid officer, at the opening reception for The Beatles Are Dull and Ordinary. Photo by Esther Ro (COM’15)
The Beatles Are Dull and Ordinary: Drawings by David X. Levine is on view at the Sherman Gallery, George Sherman Union, 775 Commonwealth Ave., second floor, through March 27. The gallery is open Tuesday to Friday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday, 1 to 5 p.m. The show is free and open to the public.