Lena Levin

As time goes by, I think of myself, more and more, as a painter of poems. This idea came to me seemingly by accident: I noticed that quieting my mind with a poem I know by heart, letting it "play" in the background, helps me concentrate on the process of painting. Gradually, I understood that whatever poem I choose, not only does it clean my mind from random noise and chases away various irrelevant "self-stories", but also noticeably influences the painting, as though striving to expresses itself through this new medium, re-tell itself in another language. Read more...

With the beginning of work on "Sonnets in colour" in January 2012, this way of painting has taken over my studio practice almost completely, even beyond the sonnets themselves. It is a complex process, full of surprises and fleeting insights; a process I don't fully understand yet. In some ways, it's similar to the process reflected in the "Connections" series: lending my eyes and my brush to the expression of something outside myself, larger than my self. But it's also different: it goes deeper into the invisible and unsayable, to where there is no difference between painting and poetry; and it depends on other kind of semantic and rhythmic waves and involves not only my sense of vision, but my mind as a whole.

In this gallery, I collected individual "poem paintings": just a painting per poem, my search for different ways to represent linguistic meanings and rhythms might in colours and lines. Small series of "poem paintings" (three or more paintings per poem) are shown in the "Found in translation" section of this website.