Surface and Depth: Recent Works by Robert Levers

By Gwendolyn Holbrow

Robert Levers is an explorer, mapping a world of abstract visual space. He doesn’t like to pass the same way again, and he doesn’t know his destination until he arrives. The adventure is the journey.

Levers explores by making marks on surfaces. “It’s a way for me to make sense of the world and comment on it, using the language I know best,” he says. In his drawings and prints, lines of all colors and textures curve and cover, wander and intersect. Rigid arrays of parallel lines meet gestural scribbles. Layer obscures layer, creating both an active surface and apparent visual depth, a duality the artist savors.  “Can the surface of a piece tell the whole story of the history of the work?” Levers wants to know. “How can you understand things when you’re only confronted with the outer shell of things?”

The medium of the marks varies wildly, including oil and acrylic paint, wax crayons, colored pencils, cut paper, and (if necessary) the kitchen sink. “My motto is, ‘Whatever it takes,’” says Levers. For printmaking, he has developed a library of plates which he uses and reuses, running a piece through the press multiple times with different plates and colors, adding a collagraph impression here, a wood block halo there, and a squiggle from a Pronto Plate over there.

Levers also uses a variety of surfaces, finding that each elicits a different artistic response. When he switched from heavy printmaking paper to thin translucent Kitikata paper, he found himself approaching it more gently. “I wanted to be softer. The other paper is made to take a lot of abuse. With this, I don’t get so wild,” says Levers.

Sheets of thin wood veneer, received as a gift, pushed him in the opposite direction. Initially, the color and grain of the wood appealed to Levers, and when he drew or printed on them, he found “electric things happening between the marks and background.” This expanded definition of wood as surface gave him a new perspective on an old woodblock plate: he could both carve into it and put down marks, emphasizing the ambiguity between two and three dimensions. “Here’s something you can read as being in front, and yet it’s physically deeper than all this other stuff,” he explains. “How can you be in two places at once? Because you really are, all the time.”

Each piece is constructed over multiple sessions, giving the artist a chance to react to the results of previous encounters. “It takes as long as it takes,” says Levers. “I would feel very uncomfortable if I did something in one session and decided it was done… When you come to it again, you’re a different person. You might push it in a different direction.”

In order to keep moving in new directions, Levers challenges himself by creating obstacles that he must overcome, rather than following familiar paths. “Holding on to those things that you like [can] stop you from moving forward,” he says. “Conflict is necessary to change.”

One such challenge has been his collaboration with Groton artist Sally Reed. In spring of 2002, the two began passing back and forth drawings, monoprints and digital prints, each adding marks in response to the other. “You accepted the notion that others might significantly alter or even obscure your work,” Levers says in Sharpening the Saw, their booklet about the experience. “I thought that was an even exchange for accepting the possibility of growth in a way that wouldn’t normally occur.”

Now that his work is on exhibit at the Lawrence Academy, Levers hopes viewers will “enter its spaces and wander around.” This encounter takes time, especially for viewers unaccustomed to abstract art. “People don’t know how to get into non-objective art. Like a language, you have to learn the grammar and vocabulary,” he says. Like learning any language, or forming any relationship, that takes time. And, as with languages and relationships, the reward for time invested is a deeper understanding of what lies beneath the surface.

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