Sandra Leveson (born 1944), also known as Sandra Leveson-Meares, is an Australian painter, printmaker, and teacher.
Training From 1959, aged fourteen, to 1963, Leveson studied design at Caulfield Institute of Technology where she and sculptor Ken Leveson met while he was taking fashion illustration. She continued studies at the National Gallery School 1959-63 and they married in 1966 and lived in Sandringham. Both taught at Brighton Technical College. In 1971 they were contemplating buying nineteenth-century mill near Castlemaine "for another environment to work in", but instead converted a warehouse into a studio-cum-townhouse at 4 Tyrone Street, South Yarra. She undertook overseas study in the UK and US in 1974 and 1976.
Career and reception
Teacher While resident at 23 Tennyson Street, Sandringham, where she was photographed in 1970 by Paul Cox (a lecturer at Prahran College) with her then husband Ken, Leveson taught printmaking at Brighton Technical College. From 1970 to 1982, she lectured in Fine Art at the Prahran College of Advanced Education where she was Head of printmaking 1972–1982. In Sydney, Prahran College graduate Carol Jerrems made a sequence of photographs of her in 1974 for A Book About Australia Women.
Artist In the late mid-1960s Leveson adopted a geometric Op Art style in her early screen prints. Of these reviewer Patrick McCaughey wrote:Good design wins out too often. These prints may contain intricacies but never real difficulties for the spectator. They do too much and make life much too easy with their bland matt colors. Pleasant enough and skilful in their decorative organisatiton, it's a pressure free art, demanding little and sustaining little. The exhibition, one suspects, hides a better artist than it reveals. The shaped polyptych upstairs promises a curtness awaiting future delivery.Later works established her as a colourist when in 1968 they were shown at Pinacotheca Gallery, Melbourne, in a joint show Recent prints 18–29 November with Alan Warren.The Sun, 20 November 1968, p. 23. However, despite their adherence to the high Modernist colour field style and to geometric abstraction then ascendant, as Foster points out, Leveson's work, and Lesley Dumbrell's likewise, was not included amongst the predominantly male artists' in the 1968 The Field survey.
In 1971 Leveson started screen printing on her canvases. Ruth Faerber in 1972 confirmed the lyrical quality of her imagery: Sandra Leveson uses an optical off-register dot pattern to create moire patterned surfaces in lyrical romantic color. Built up with a minute pointilistic technique, large silkscreen prints in editions, single canvases and double-sided glass images conjure up drifting recangular and diamond forms, structured by strongly contrasting stable and strict borders of flat color. Skill and sensitivity are superbly combined in works of restful elegance. That emphasis led her American Abstract Expressionist-influenced works of the 1970s, and first seen in Sydney in 1972 at The Holdsworth Galleries, which in turn was adapted to her semi-abstract representation of expansive Australian landscape.
However McCaughey continued to regard Leveson's work of this period, shown at Realties at the end of 1972, as lightweight: They make all the right moves for seriousness. I mean they've got "color spread", "optical displacement" and even some cautious shaped prints. But we've all been dragged round this track too often for the moves to come off. There's not a twitch we can't predict, except one's own aghast grimace. Daniel Thomas pointed out in her 1974 show at Bonython the link between Leveson's screen printing, through the use of stencils, with her painting, describing the effect in her "Optic Series" as "like looking at a pale Rothko through a flyscreen." Thomas noted that she was then selling works at around $1,000. Leveson in interview said the effect was inspired on her overseas residencies during which she took photographs of mist and fog, "showing images behind a curtain, a natural haze."
Age reviewer Maureen Gilchrist summing up exhibitions of the year 1976 concluded that Leveson's at Realities gallery, with those of Lesley Dumbrell at Powell Street, were "the year's most compelling", her "large canvases, painted and then successively silkscreened with one of the dominant colors, achieves extraordinarily subtle effects of hovering, vibration and translucency. These lyrical works have such titles as Lesbos, evoking a female consiciousnses." In April, Gilchrist reviewed the survey of ten years of the artist's work held at Melbourne University, and remarked on its evolution and the influence of her overseas travel to see Noland, Rothko, Louis, Turner and Monet; In the earlier screen prints and acrylics Leveson was involved with optics and with creating a simple, clearly defined, geometric regularity. Gradually she began to relinquish this approach and is now attempting a far more complex unity. In the new canvases she begins with a brushy, gestural spread of colors, usually applied centrally, and then successively screens one of the dominant colors over these, employing a silkscreen technique. The effect is a series of semitransparent veils [...] The effect is as fugitive as an apparition, but it is not amorphous. The silk-screened veil of dots acts as a regulating device, a grid, balancing the fluid, spontaneously brushed gestures of the hand. Paul Taylor of the same retrospective also noted the synthesis of "juxtaposed gestural strokes with the screenprint grid and also ... the lyrical palette".
In April 1978 Leveson was invited onto a "Discussion Panel On Painting" at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in conjunction with the exhibition of a paintings there by John Walker, chaired by Patrick McCaughey, with David Aspden, Syd Ball, John Firth-Smith, Alun Leach-Jones and John Peart. Then in June that year joined in the symposium "Views on Recent Changes in Women's Art", with Janine Burke, Lesley Dumbrell, Helen Geier, Memory Holloway, Jenny Watson, Elizabeth Gower at Powell Street Gallery South Yarra. In 1987, Leveson was again invited to the AGNSW as a speaker in "Artists on Art", beside William Delafield Cook, Fred Cress, John Firth-Smith, Robert Jacks, Michael Johnson, Colin Lanceley, Terence Maloon on Hilarie Mais, Susan Norrie and Richard Dunn, Tim Storrier, Ann Thomson and John Wolseley for the Centre for the History of the Decorative Arts.
Also by 1978, Leveson had found a receptive market in Fort Worth, Texas, for Australian landscapes that looked familiar to Texans, exhibiting paintings and prints at Gallery One, later named William Campbell Contemporary Art.
Sasha Grishin, in 1978, reacted with a contrary view of her contributions at Susan Gillespie Galleries, Canberra: "Sandra Leveson's suite of four screenprints, 'Half Moon Bay' Nos 1 to 4, with its juxtaposition of photographic seascapes and soft pastel-like backgrounds, leads to nowhere and is executed with a professional slickness that leaves one uneasy." Likewise Robert Rooney, reviewing her contributions to a group show at Realities in early 1979 in The Age considered her lyricism as having been taken too far, with "gestures ... devoid of energy and her colors favor powder puff flesh and eye shadow. Fresh Water Plain has superimposed dot screens for added strength, but it doesn't come off. Not as good as her early stuff."
McCulloch in 2006 characterised her style as "coolly restrained abstracts, which are often characterised by pastel blues and pinks divided by a horizon-like line".
In 1980 after her second husband Russell Meares accepted a professorship in psychology at the University of Sydney, he and Leveson relocated from Melbourne to Sydney, converting a former chemical warehouse in Balmain for a large studio. However her Harbour-inspired imagery left reviewer Memory Holloway detecting no emotion and "one idea, one image which is flogged into submission: a tough and aggressive triangle", in over-simplified compositions in which "the eye is never enticed into the work, never arrested or caught in any visual tangle, but glides effortlessly over the slick surfaces without interruption". On her own work in 1987 Leveson remarked: "Basically I'm a romantic so I like that thing about the image being not quite there, fugitive, ephemeral."
Exhibitions
Solo Leveson achieved early recognition and from 1962, then aged 18, she commenced a series of solo shows, first in Melbourne's Pinacotheca, and Realities and later, Greythorn, and at Macquarie Galleries in Sydney. Others include: 1962, to 29 November: Sandra Leveson, Pinacotheca, St Kilda 1968, 18–29 November: Recent prints Joint show with Alan Warren. Pinacotheca 1970: Joint show, Strines Gallery, Cnr Rathdown & Faraday Sts., Carlton 1972, March: Holdsworth Art Gallery 1972, December: Realities, Toorak 1974, from 1 February: Sandra Leveson, paintings and prints and Gordon Andrews, jewellery and sculpture. Bonython Art Gallery, Sydney 1976: Realities Gallery, Toorak 1977, 26 April – 3 June: A Decade of Sandra Leveson, Melbourne University 1978, 4–18 August: Paper Works, with Peter Powditch, Powell Street Gallery 1978, 18 November – 8 December: First US exhibition, Gallery One, Fort Worth, Texas 1980, 29 March – 12 April: Sandra Leveson, New Paintings, Australia's Finest Contemporary Artist, Gallery One, Fort Worth, Texas 1980, to 24 December: Prints by Sandra Leveson, Axiom Gallery, Richmond 1982, 5–26 November: Recent paintings and works on paper by Sandra Leveson Meares. Realities gallery, Toorak 1983, 7 May – 18 June: Sandra Leveson-Meares, Gallery One, Fort Worth, Texas 1985, 5–23 February: Sandra Leveson-Meares - Gouaches, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney 1985, 22 October – 6 November: Paintings by Sandra Leveson-Meares, William Campbell Contemporary Art, Fort Worth, Texas 1987, 4–22 August: Recent Paintings by Sandra Leveson, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney 1989, 18 March–8 April: Sandra Leveson : Recent Paintings, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney 1991: Exhibition of works by Sandra Leveson and David Van Nunen from the 1990 Artists' Camp organised by the Museums and Art Galleries of the Northern Territory 1991, 12 October – 16 November: Australian painter Sandra Leveson, William Campbell Contemporary Art, Fort Worth, Texas 1994, to 8 January: Sandra Leveson 30 Year Survey, Campbelltown City Art Gallery 1994: New England Regional Art Museum with a tour of regional galleries 1994, December–January: William Campbell Contemporary Art, Fort Worth, Texas 1994–95, 2 December to 22 January: Sandra Leveson 30 Year Survey, Campbelltown City Art Gallery 1995: Wagga Wagga City Art Gallery 1995, June: Sandra Leveson : Impressions of the Landscape, Greythorn Galleries, Toorak 1996: A Decade of Sandra Leveson 1986-1996, BMG Art Gallery, Adelaide 2011: Sandra Leveson : painting of poise and passion, TarraWarra Museum of Art 2015: Sandra Leveson : painting of poise and passion, Macquarie University. Art Gallery
Group
1971: A Decade of Australian Painting, McClelland Gallery 1971 1973: Georges Invitation Art Prize