Kathy’s easels range from enormous four by five foot pieces of varnished wood to small delicate notecards. The paintings are augmented with images and life on the May River, and related artifacts, including the prominent number thirteen river marker.
Written by Louise Collier
Original Artwork by Kathy Levey
rowing up in her home state of Darien Connecticut, Kathy always pursued personal art projects in various mediums. After graduating with a degree in Studio Arts, she decided painting was the method and form of art she felt the most comfortable creating.
Her work has a unique style and because of the merging of many techniques it may be hard to categorize, but it can be clustered around two basic inclinations: an emphasis on dynamic gesture, in contrast to imagery that is primarily impressions of visual realities.
It is obvious Kathy’s source of inspiration involves her love of nature overlapping with the beauty of the May River.
Her intuitive feel for water perhaps was enhanced by her extra curricular activities. Kathy is a professional in the field of aquatics. She is a licensed Swim America Program Director through the American Swimming Coaches Association (ASCA.) She has been managing successful Swim America programs for the last seven years. For the past two years Kathy has run a successful swim school out of the Bluffton Community Pool. She offers beginner, intermediate, and advanced classes. She is responsible for passing on new recruits to “The Bluffton Fins,” a new year-round USA professional swim team under the direction of her friend and colleague, Head Coach Eric Kemeny. Last year Kathy and Kelly Minasi started Bluffton”s first summer league swim team, “The Bluffton Redfish.”
But painting is her passion and this is what is salutary for the soul.
In most of her pieces, Kathy paints timeless and powerful subject matter and turns to an almost primitive expression that is simple and clean. She has developed a signature that is distinctive. Her style of work ranges from abstract, abstract expressionism, impressionism and realism. Her paintings explore the appearance of the sublime through large expanses of color interrupted by zips, one or more vertical lines of contrasting hue. Art critic Harold Rosenberg once said “At a certain moment the canvas begins to appear to one painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What has been put on the canvas is not a picture but an event.”
Kathy moved to Bluffton and has exhibited her paintings in The Calhoun Art Gallery as well as teaching art at Cross Episcopal School. She also is available by appointment only, for private and small group lessons.
She was asked to create artwork for a children’s book and working on this project has proven to be an edifying and exciting experience. After finishing twelve story boards the book is now in the “waiting to be published” stage.
Look for Kathy Levey and her paintings down on Calhoun Street at the Bluffton May Festival, May 12.
