Alexandria Levin has exhibited her work in galleries, museums, and cultural centers across the country since 1981. Her paintings are in private collections from Boston to Tokyo and London, as well as in 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 was awarded major state grants from the California Arts Council and Massachusetts Arts Lottery Council, plus she has received various exhibition and purchase awards. 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.

As a child in New York City, all Alexandria wanted was art supplies. Painting has always been a means of story-telling about her life, as well as portraying her observations of the world. Her natural inclination to allegorical, narrative work has continued to deepen over time, and has continued through to include landscapes that tell stories and abstractions that evoke emotion.

In early 2016, Alexandria moved to the Pacific Northwest, a place she had visited often beforehand, and dreamed about for a very long time.

"Painting is religion to me, it is how I commune with the spirits. The sensual act of working in oil is one of balancing truly being able to see, while giving form to the unseen.

I spend quality time painting, developing a relationship with the work. I build up layers, scrape away, glaze over with transparencies, add more opacities with brushes and other tools... Until the painting itself tells me, "I'm done".

I work exclusively with my own photographs as source material. I then play with abstraction, memory, intent, and metaphor. Elements of my earliest artwork are reappearing in abstracted factories, dark houses with blank windows, the background stare. I am curious to see where these things will lead this time.

Trees have been important subject matter for a long time, from individual tree portraits to allegorical forests to the Tree of Life itself. In recent years I have become fascinated by the local broken trees, between the electric lines and the ice storms. They are survivors, seemingly disabled and disfigured, but beautiful just the same. Along with the otherwise disfigured or oddly shaped trees, all subjects of human interference and climate change."

Media: Oil | Watercolor | Fiber & Fabric | Jewelry

Studio Number: 41

Address: 2734 NE 65th Ave Portland OR 97213

Community: NE Portland

Accessibility: Not Wheelchair accessible (There are a few stairs out front)

Email: paintedjay@gmail.com

Website: alexalev.com

Instagram: @alexandrialevin

Alexandria Levin

Alexandria Levin

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