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Statement
I have been interested in painting ever since I first realized that my father’s studio occupied what everyone else would call the living room. When I grew older, we moved into a bigger house that included a separate space for making art, but to this day, the smell of oil paint still evokes home as much as it does the studio.
I am interested in how the surface of a work represents everything that has gone into the piece—all of the marks, seen and unseen, that are the story of decisions taken, accepted and rejected. What does the accumulation of experience look like? How does the past give form to the present, the present reveal the past—are they friends? Is it possible to tell a story without presenting a sequence of “events”? Perhaps this reflects my deep interest in sound and music, both of which rely upon the element of time to unfold.
My drawings and paintings make use of a number of different materials— often within the same work. For example, working on wood has allowed me to use woodcutting tools to draw into the surface, often resulting in contradictions related to the physical location of marks made by a brush loaded with paint.
After painting for a number of years, I found an approach to printmaking that allowed me to hold on to many of those things that I valued about painting—most notably, the ability to get somewhere quickly and the quality of the surface I was able to achieve through visiting the paper again and again. I have been making prints produced by multiple impressions from a growing library of fixed matrices and plates made on the spot. They draw upon a wide range of printmaking techniques, including traditional monotype, etching, woodcut, linocut, lithography, collograph and drypoint. I have also experimented with digital printmaking—including a collaboration with another artist on a series of digital images shared through email.
Copyright 2008 Robert B. Levers
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