I was born and grew up until I was thirteen years old on Long Island in New York State. The first influence on my work was my father who had gone to Pratt Art School in Brooklyn, New York to study painting. He later became a creative director at a major ad agency in New York City and would come home from work with drawing pads and markers for my older brother and I to draw on. Besides nature, drawing was the only thing we spent our time on as small children. Competition grew between my brother and I, at least for me it did as the younger brother. I always tried to draw as well as he could with his more advanced motor skills. Though we are Jewish, drawing the perfect Christmas tree, symmetrical and decorated became an obsession of ours. This drive to perfect an image and to compete with another artist is still very much alive in me today, for better and worse. When I was slightly older I became obsessed with drawing war pictures as all the boys of my age did. These were active and violent and filled with blood and explosions and could not be done with out constant sound effects. I was sensing that my drawings were slightly more controlled than my friends and that I was able to use my facility to better illustrate my thoughts. It is around this time that most people make up their mind to stop drawing all together or to continue on. This was in the fourth grade. From that point forward I took art in school and was considered one of the people who “could draw”. My notebooks were filled with drawings and only a few notes. When I was in eighth grade I was enrolled in the most incredible school that Log Island had to offer in my mind. It was and is still called the Huntington School of Fine Arts. I was pleased to find them still teaching high school students, real art, and preparing them for college. That was my first exposure to fine art. My brother was also enrolled in the school and drove us there as I was till too young. I sculpted a head from a photograph of a man in Panama hat and painted, in oils, a crumpled brown paper bag under a yellow light. The studios were on the harbor in the town and huge windows looked out over the boats and the docks while classical music filled the background and creativity was everywhere. Just before I entered High School on Long Island, my brother showed me the lyric book for Pink Floyd The Wall. It changed my life and made me interested in writing and poetry in a single moment. At the same time I had heard about a progressive boarding school located in Vermont from a friend of the family. It sounded creative and free and thoughtful. I asked my parents if could leave home and go there. As my brother was leaving for Philadelphia College of the Arts to study painting and sculpture at the same time my parents elected to move to the city instead of sending my brother and I off the same year. I ended up at a school called Walden, based on Henry David Thearou’s book, Walden. It was progressive and filled with hippies and poets and guys with guitar cases. It was also where I met my art teacher Steven Ettinger who looked like and acted like Picasso. I also began drawing from a live model at the National Academy of Art and Design on 89th street in Manhattan in ninth grade and studying the works of Cezanne and Van Gogh at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The time I spent in front of Cezanne’s canvases at the Met is still the most important influence on my work bar none. He laid it all out in his work and it was there for me to pick the fruit from. He is still my favorite artist. The other great influence on me and eventually my work, around this time was a book showing the Sistine Chapel ceiling by Michaelangelo Buonarotti. It was right around the time I was becoming sexually interested in the world and there was this book. It was the most inspiring and exciting thing I had seen to that point in my life. It remains in that position today. I drew at the Art Students League on 57th Street in New York City. In eleventh grade I went the to a summer intensive at Boston University, School of Visual Arts. The following year I worked as an electrician at the Hangar Theatre in Ithaca, New York for two month. Theatre had become a passion of mine for many years, being trained in lighting design at Walden. I attended Sarah Lawrence College in Westchester, New York where I studied, writing, painting, sculpting, drawing, philosophy and religion. I did not take an oil painting course until my senior year but knew that, that was what I had wanted to do with my life upon graduation. It was clear to me though I had waited to start the practice of painting. I did not get along with my drawing teacher but she really taught me how to draw. I did not get along with my freshman studies teacher. I did get along with my senior sculpture teacher. I absolutely did not get along with my oil painting teacher and after a big fight we both agreed that one semester was enough and I left the class. I answered an intern ad for an artist assistant in New York City and ended up having the good fortune of working with an artist named Ora Lerman for several years assisting her in a large Percent for Art project for a public school in New York City. She was a very process oriented artist and had me and the other assistant make her paint for her and tube it, stretch her canvases, and size them with glue and prime them with oil primer. We transfered her drawings for her to the canvases and did her underpainting for her. It is where I learned all I knew to that point about the technical side of painting. She gave me a book of the Sistine Chapel ceiling for my college graduation with the inscription, “Look to the giants on your journey…”. Thank you to Ora, who passed away several years ago.

Website: http://www.simonlevenson.com/