The Beatles are Dull and Ordinary: Drawings by David X. Levine

January 20–March 27, 2015 The Beatles are Dull and Ordinary is a ten-year journey through the expressive and vibrant large-scale colored pencil drawings of New York-based artist David X. Levine. Levine’s drawings are spiritually subtle: slow to build, emerging through the lenses of pop culture and postmodernism. Stirring the mind, they thrive with shape, composition, and above all, vivid color. Beginning as a poet in the 1980s, by 1990 Levine morphed into a visual artist with his poetry informing his visual art with subtlety, sensitivity and lyricism. Often taking his practice to physical extremes, Levine’s vivid, labor-intensive colored pencil drawings range in scale from the intimate to the monumental (10” to 10’). Incorporating abstract forms and patterns as well as collage relating to popular and high culture, Levine creates an illusory formal vocabulary that inhabits lushly optical spaces, generating rich associations that reach out beyond their compositional spaces. Levine’s drawings are very slow: slow to vision and thought, but they intensify with repeated viewing. All of the work has some kind of humor mixed in with its profound seriousness. The paradox of the slow but very exciting simultaneity is funny; the way life can seem mostly funny and deter complete understanding. Levine’s unfailingly optimistic drawings seem to have as their aim profound joy. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated color catalogue with an essay by Carl Belz, director emeritus of the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University.