Last Wednesday, Sept. 27, Rebecca Levitan showcased various works of art in Swan Hall from the course of her career, illustrating her progress as an artist into a visual timeline.
In the first installment of the College of Arts and Sciences’ art presentations, organized by art professor, Annu Palakannathu Matthew, Levitan shared her journey from the perspective of a student.
“I tried to think about, ‘what did I want to know about an artist when I was a student?’” Levitan said.
She decided to center her presentation around this question, discussing how she figured out what she wanted to do with her art. Levitan’s paintings focus on capturing the mundane ordinary, finding ways to preserve the experience of living in a world that is virtual and physical.
Her origin story began when she was around 4 years old. She made a card after discovering that her mother was pregnant with her brother.
“I was going to make my mom a card, and it was going to be the best card that existed in the whole world,” Levitan said. “I would just draw every single thing in the whole world, and that would make it the best card.”
Levitan believes that this card started her journey, as she still recognizes qualities that remain in her art today: obsessiveness, trying to fit the whole world in a small space and giving herself an impossible goal of doing too many things at once.
After attending an arts-intensive middle school, she began to feel as though she was doing everything slightly wrong and that she wasn’t creating art that was as neat as those around her.
In high school, without access to an arts program, Levitan transferred her artistic expression into making theater costumes.
She began to explore the art of using oil paint, watercolors, and worked hard to become proficient in using multiple mediums.
“I’m still slowly making these watercolors and slowly things are shifting,” Levitan said when talking about her time after graduating college. “Some of my interests are starting to combine together, patterns coming in, techniques from other crafts I’m interested in.”
Levitan finds inspiration in art that depicts the good, the bad and the ugly, where viewers can make their own interpretations about the work in front of them. She also looks to textiles for inspiration, as well, as she says that they hide darker themes and weirdness in an overall image of beauty.
Levitan then shared her own paintings, explaining how she utilized the medium of three-dimensional design and physical models to plan her works, specifically with one where she wanted to show time in a still image, titled “the tide goes out before it comes in.”
“I really like the fact that my work is really varied, and part of what I’m interested in conveying through my paintings is how impossible it is to hold all of the different kinds of visual information you see in one image, or one body of work,” Levitan said. “I like that it all ends up in a really consistent form, even though it might start off in a very varied place.”
Levitan said that when she’s interested in a subject, she’ll draw her way through it to understand it better and ask herself the questions: “What is interesting about this? How could this become a painting?”
In addition, she’ll take pictures with her phone of everyday scenes that pique her interest. Some of these images may become paintings, and the others still give her new ideas of how to depict life through her eyes.
“In the end what I’m trying to do is make paintings about the world we live in, but in a way that actually feels like what it feels like to be alive now with a sort-of focus on the everyday moments,” Levitan said.
Rebecca Levitan uploads her work on her website,
To learn about more events like the artist showing, the art department recently started a monthly newsletter that you can sign up for on their website at web.uri.edu/art/about. There is another visiting artist lecture on Oct. 17 that will be open for the public to attend, as well.