Burt Levitsky left New York more than 30 years ago, but the streets of Manhattan still pulse to life in his realist oil paintings.
Trained as an illustrator and Madison Avenue ad designer, Levitsky recalls working on ad layouts by day and coming home to paint all night. Studying with Frank Reilly and Max Ginsburg, Levitsky mastered contemporary realist imagery that was always haunted by the moods and hustle of urban life. There’s a lot of George Tooker’s ennui and Thomas Hart Benton’s vitality in his ambitious portrayals of people embedded in their metropolitan landscapes.
And while he still travels to New York each year to see family, Levitsky has been a familiar feature of downtown Santa Cruz since 1973. “I was just going to stay for a little while,” he jokes, “but I kept coming back.”
Admitting that his figurative style went against the fashionable grain of abstract expressionism and, more recently, conceptual art, Levitsky is passionately dedicated to old masters techniques of careful preliminary drawing, chiaroscuro underpainting and then a build-up of glazes that lends depth and color brilliance to his work. Of the 16 paintings on exhibit—mid-scale oils on linen—most bear the lineage of his urban illustration days. Streets slick with rain, richly rendered architectural motifs, skyscrapers lost in the clouds. A few of the works are sensuous still lifes, with lustrous drapery and gleaming pewter echoing the great tradition of northern renaissance style. Levitsky admits his meticulously detailed realism hearkens back to earlier trends in painting, but he has no regrets. “As you look back—and at my age you can see decades past—you can see what your work was all about. I did what I wanted,” he admits. “You never know where it’s going to lead, so you need to please yourself.”
BURT LEVITSKY: CONTEMPORARY REALIST is on exhibit at MichaelAngelo Gallery, 1111 River St., Santa Cruz, through March 28. 831.426. 5500.
