Roberta Levitow

In a world of often unbearable challenges, I use humor to make sense of the senseless. Strongly influenced by the storytelling power of traditional icons, I create contemporary, secular icons to explore highly personal and symbolic narratives.

Born into a family of animation cartoonists (my father was the animator and animation director, Abe Levitow), I became a theatre director. Throughout a 40-year career as one of America’s pioneer women theatre directors nationally and internationally, my work strongly emphasized visual storytelling.

With a lifelong commitment to the power of storytelling to confer and challenge meaning, I center narrative in my paintings. I use the techniques of the ancient practice I learned in workshops in traditional egg-tempera Russian-style icon painting. An autodidact, I also took classes at the Otis College of Art & Design - oil painting with the late Franklyn Liegel, as well as Old Masters techniques, trompe l’oeil, life drawing and anatomy.

I am strongly influenced by the collision of past and present, the timeless and the topical, high and low cultural imagery. My secular icons forge symbolic elements with contemporary references and blend historical narratives with pop culture and the surreal. Using intense bold colors, textures and gold leaf, I place narrative fragments from historical icons in a theatrical mise-en-scene that includes commercial references, religious archetypes and dream imagery to evoke an emotional contemplation of the challenges of 21st century life.