MARISSA LEVIEN — MIXED MEDIA

ink, watercolor, colored pencil, and gold leaf on collaged book pages | 2015 | 29×23

ink, watercolor, and gold leaf on collaged book pages | 2015 | 19×19

ink, colored pencil, and gold leaf on collaged book pages | 2016 | 28×28

ink, oil pastel, and collaged book pages | 2017 | 26×26

Heirloom Series

A few years ago, my aunt gifted me a number of old history books from my great great grandfather. She knew I was making a habit of cutting up books and collaging them, and she specifically asked if I could do something similar for her using these materials. The spines of the books were ragged, the pages were yellow, and strings poked out of the binding. Most margins were covered in my great great grandfather’s scribbling– he was a history teacher in Germany, and multilingual, so the notes were in English, German, and Latin. I ended up arguing with myself over my right to use these as art materials– these books were heirlooms in their own right, and the idea of cutting up something so old made me nervous. On the other hand, the books were in bad shape, and considering their condition it was unlikely anyone was going to take them out regularly and appreciate them. They seemed destined to deteriorate in a particularly dusty corner of an attic. So I gave myself the go-ahead to transform them. \nI grew up in the Pacific Northwest, but my ancestry is all proud Iowa farmers. In keeping with that region and tradition, the women in my family were all very practical and self-sufficient. They knew how to make things. In particular, the women of my family were and are amazing at sewing, crocheting, and especially quilting. It is a regret of mine that I never learned to operate a sewing machine, let alone quilt. When I was still in school I always meant to spend a summer with my grandmother and learn to sew properly, but time got away from me. By the time I was in college, she was gone. I felt it was important if I was making art about family that I try to adhere to this history and legacy in the best way I could: by quilting with paper. This way, I still honor my family with an heirloom, in a manner that they would recognize and value. This way, even if I’ve changed the medium, I still connect my own heritage of the artists and makers who came before me.

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, but my ancestry is all proud Iowa farmers. In keeping with that region and tradition, the women in my family were all very practical and self-sufficient. They knew how to make things. In particular, the women of my family were and are amazing at sewing, crocheting, and especially quilting. It is a regret of mine that I never learned to operate a sewing machine, let alone quilt. While I was still in school I always meant to spend a summer with my grandmother and learn to sew properly, but time got away from me. By the time I was in college, she was gone. I felt it was important if I was making art about family that I try to adhere to this history and legacy in the best way I could — by quilting with paper. This way, I still honor my family with an heirloom, in a manner that they would recognize and value. This way, even if I’ve changed the medium, I still connect my own heritage of the artists and makers who came before me.

Universe Series

hand-drawn ink on paper | 2018

hand-drawn ink and gouache on mat board | 2017

From Universe Series:

Over the past two years, I’ve found myself in need of meditation. Part of this was the state of the world: humanity seems a little bleaker these days. Part of this was self-imposed changes in my own life, changes to do with my career, my location, and my relationships. Both personally and on a global scale, nothing felt familiar. I suddenly felt a very different creative compulsion bubbling up to the surface.

Out of nowhere, out of the most abstract parts of my brain, I started to draw circles. I drew more and more in repetition, almost like automatic writing, and watched patterns form without any thought or plan. Over time, I started thinking of these globulous masses as their own universes or scientific processes: life and nature amassing in their own way, sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes harmonious, and sometimes cancerous. I’m not sure this would work for everybody, but when I get overwhelmed I take comfort in recognizing my own insignificance in the span of time and space. There’s something soothing to me in knowing how minuscule I am, how minuscule humanity is, in comparison with everything that has come before, everything that will follow, and everything that is happening in the far reaches of this universe that we neither recognize nor comprehend.

Marissa Levien is a writer and artist who hails from Washington State, but now lives in New York with a kindly journalist and their two cats. Her writing and illustrations have been published in Slice, The Toast, Literary Manhattan, Storychord, Sundog Lit, and on the Glimmer Train Honorable Mentions Short List. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Fiction from Stony Brook University in Southampton. She also regularly contributes her literary wiles to the Greenwich Village Literary Pubcrawl.