Jessica Levant is a native San Franciscan who decamped to New York and London for 30 years before returning returning ‘home’. A photo artist with SFWA since 2010, she took a deep dive during the pandemic lockdown period, and shifted from making art with pixels to using her hands, making collages and soon after, abstract paintings. She now finds herself fully immersed in the abstract mixed media camp with acrylics, hand-crated papers, found print and old photographs as her primary art fodder. She learned some basic techniques and principles online from Nick Wilton (Sausalito) and then enrolled in two long online workshops with Louise Fletcher in the North of England. The latter boosted her output and confidence (and world-wide art community) and she now can’t seem to stop creating. She lives in the midst of her studio/workshop/gallery also known as a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco’s Dogpatch.
In the earlier days, she defined her Photo Art as ‘unexpected views of the ordinary and ordinary views of the unexpected’. She is drawn to shapes, juxtapositions and visual irony, mostly in urban settings. She is not averse to the term ‘quirky’ and all these words carry over to much of her mixed media work.
Early on she produced two ‘little coffee table books’ of her photo art, the first ‘Through My Eyes‘ and the second, Street Seens, both available at blurb.com. She then embarked on a project of photographing musicians and has published two volumes of Bay Area Jazz and Bluesicians, books containing color photos and bios of over 250 artists, documenting the local jazz scene over a two year period. She is now a well-known music photographer in the Bay Area. In the past few years, she has combined her photo art with her love for music and created many ‘Music Art’ pieces that have been shown and collected around the Bay Area.
Jessica’s work has been selected for most of the juried shows at the San Francisco Women Artists Gallery since mid-2010 and has exhibited at several other Bay Area galleries in San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and the East Bay. Her more recent paintings and mixed media have been shown at SFWA, The Drawing Room, Ingleside Gallery, and Live Worms Gallery.
She has several collectors locally and across the United States.
See a broad range of Jessica’s work on her website at jessicalevantart.com and instagram.com/jessicalevantart.
