ARTIST STATEMENT
Terri Levine is a contemporary realist painter who works primarily in oils. In her paintings, she captures compositionally complex moments of stillness and foregrounds the presence and play of light. Her work conveys a sense of quiet claustrophobia as it both revels in and rebels against the spaces it depicts. These moments of stillness allow for a focus on and magnification of the details of one’s immediate surroundings, ranging in tone from contemplative to frenetic while consistently allowing for the extraction of pleasure from a close attendance to the balance of color and form.
Terri's most recent work is a prolonged meditation on her experience breastfeeding her son, a practice she has found to be complicated by social stigma, perceived public ownership of female bodies, inadequate education, and unsolicited input. The paintings in this series are a collection of attempts to express the exquisite and excruciating intimacy and transience of breastfeeding; they are characterized by attention to the translucency and layered chroma of skin, the warmth generated by close contact between human forms, and shifts in lighting to depict the repetitious, temporal, and often sleepless nature of this practice. Formally, the work is built up over time with many layers of scumbling and glazing and, while representational, allows for a delight in abstracted fields of color.