ELIZABETH VIRGINIA LEVESQUE

Red – My Martian Landscapes

It’s been over 2 years since I’ve posted here. A lot has happened. There is much to say and share.

Till then, here is a meager offering of content I cobbled together after revisiting my time in school and old artworks. With distance now, I can see that I spent a lot of time flirting with red.

Square contemporary oil painting by Philadelphia, PA artist Elizabeth Virginia Levesque. A girl with pink skin and red hair is submerged up to her shoulders in a red sea. Her eyes are closed. She appears to be resting. Above her a large white cloud sits against teal green sky. Red rain drops pour from the cloud onto the girl and into the red ocean.

Diorama like paper assemblage sculpture features a red sea and teal blue sky. In the red ocean are pink paper mermaids. Red paper drops hang from the assemblage from silk thread strings. A pink fish tail also hangs from the bottom. In the sky are white clouds and a giant eyeball looks down on the scene.

Capacity of Color – PAFA Class Curated Art Show

During the spring semester of 2019 I was enrolled in a class called Exhibitions & Curatorial Visions taught by artist Alexis Granwell. Our assignment was to come up with an art show concept, put out a call for art, curate and install in PAFA’s Anne Bryan Gallery.

We chose the broad theme of color, choosing to privilege this element over all others and titled it Capacity of Color. Every student in the class took on a specific job that goes into throwing a successful art show. I did most of the advertisement collateral: art show flyer, instagram images, press release design and so on.

Capacity of Color was an overall cohesive and successful exhibition. The space, a basement gallery with low ceilings and no natural light, was used effectively. The low placement of many of the displayed sculptures, cleverly created an intimacy between the viewer and art. Other installations, like Suji Kanneganti and Jessica Aquino’s fabric pieces, flowed from floor to ceiling to create an effective upward movement, leading the eye from the floor pieces to the two-dimensional works on the walls.

There was a large number of small pieces in the show, stand alone and in groupings. I believe, if installed in a standard way, they would have been overwhelmed, but instead, they were staggered which helped make a more interesting space and saved each piece from being swallowed by the white walls and basement shadows.

There were a few pieces in the show that I did not feel played well with the rest, and if I was able to change things, I would have left some works out and instead juried other submissions in. I believe that the less representational works were, the more they fit into the overall exhibition.

I learned a lot from the experience and will jump at chances to curate in the future.

Isabelle Schipper, Jessica Aquino,
JP Calabro

The Capacity of Color is a student-curated
exhibition of sculpture, site-specific installation,
painting, drawing, printmaking, and works on paper
from the Brodsky Center Archive. This exhibition deals
with 2D and 3D work that communicates the language
of color in terms of the optical, the symbolic, the
aggressive, the delicate, and the tactile. This grouping
of work pushes the boundaries of the capacity of color
in an expansive and exciting way.
Exhibiting Artists:
Alicia Greco – Ashley Garner – Bernadette Colburn
Bryon Kim – Claire Tenhula – Emma Keller – Iris Padilla
Isabelle Schipper – Jessica Aquino – JP Calabro
Kelly Micca – Kemeys Goethe – Kiki Smith – Nasir Young
Neill Catanguy – Rebecca Giles – Sally Richards
Shane Lowder – Suji Kanneganti – Jiatong Tian

Broken Pony Bouquet – Oil Painting

Square contemporary oil painting by Philadelphia, PA artist Elizabeth Virginia Levesque. Still life painting featuring a vintage My Little Pony pink body. Instead of the pony doll's head is a colorful bunch of flowers sitting in the neck hole like the pony doll is a vase. Conversation candy hearts lay in the foreground. The composition's background is made up of green and teal blue paper.

Unicorns – More Childhood Scribblings

You can practically hear the dot matrix printer grinding away when looking at these pages!

While in elementary school(Garrettford Elementary was a Great Place to Grow!), I participated in some creative writing classes. Our county schools also participated in a program/contest called The Young Authors, where every year kids submitted stories they wrote, which were then judged by grade. I loved it and won several times.

This little book, which I never finished the drawings for all the pages, was from a summer creative writing class. I was likely in 3rd grade at the time. I was really excited when I found this in a box at my parents house. It’s been interesting to see that the themes in my paintings go back so far. Unicorns and skulls.

It’s clear I loved fantasy as a child. My favorite toys were My Little Pony dolls, She-Ra and my Rainbow Brite. This little book was probably a result of watching The Last Unicorn. I also was obsessed with Unico. It was life changing when that came on the Disney channel.