Sandra Leveson (born 1944), also known as Sandra Leveson-Meares, is an Australian painter, printmaker, and teacher.
Training
From 1959, aged fourteen, to 1963, Leveson studied design at Caulfield Institute of Technology where she and sculptor Ken Leveson met while he was taking fashion illustration. She continued studies at the National Gallery School 1959-63 and they married in 1966 and lived in Sandringham and both taught at Brighton Technical College. In 1971 they were contemplating buying nineteenth-century mill near Castlemaine "for another environment to work in," but instead converted a warehouse to a studio-cum-townhouse at 4 Tyrone Street, South Yarra. She undertook overseas study in the UK and US in 1974 and 1976.
Career and reception
Teacher
While resident at 23 Tennyson Street, Sandringham, where she was photographed in 1970 by Paul Cox (lecturer at Prahran College) with her then husband Ken, Leveson taught printmaking at Brighton Technical College. From 1970 to 1982 she lectured in Fine Art at the Prahran College of Advanced Education where she was Head of printmaking 1972–82. In Sydney, Prahran College graduate Carol Jerrems made a sequence of photographs of her in 1974 for A Book About Australia Women.
Artist
In the late mid-1960s Leveson adopted a geometric Op Art style in her early screen prints. Of these reviewer Patrick McCaughey wrote:Good design wins out too often. These prints may contain intricacies but never real difficulties for the spectator. They do too much and make life much too easy with their bland matt colors. Pleasant enough and skilful in their decorative organisatiton, it's a pressure free art, demanding little and sustaining little. The exhibition, one suspects, hides a better artist than it reveals. The shaped polyptych upstairs promises a curtness awaiting future delivery.Later works established her as a colourist when in 1968 they were shown at Pinacotheca Gallery, Melbourne, in a joint show Recent prints 18 – 29 November with Alan Warren. However, despite their adherence to the high Modernist colour field style and to geometric abstraction then ascendant, as Foster points out, Leveson's work, and Lesley Dumbrell's likewise, was not included amongst the predominantly male artists' in the 1968 The Field survey.
In 1971 Leveson started screen printing on her canvases. Ruth Faerber in 1972 confirmed the lyrical quality of her imagery;Sandra Leveson uses an optical off-register dot pattern to create moire patterned surfaces in lyrical romantic color. Built up with a minute pointilistic technique, large silkscreen prints in editions, single canvases and double-sided glass images conjure up drifting recangular and diamond forms, structured by strongly contrasting stable and strict borders of flat color. Skill and sensitivity are superbly combined in works of restful elegance.That emphasis led her American Abstract Expressionist-influenced works of the 1970s, and first seen in Sydney in 1972 at The Holdsworth Galleries, which in turn was adapted to her semi-abstract representation of expansive Australian landscape.
However McCaughey continued to regard Leveson's work of this period, shown at Realties at the end of 1972, as lightweight;They make all the right moves for seriousness. I mean they've got "color spread", "optical displacement" and even some cautious shaped prints. But we've all been dragged round this track too often for the moves to come off. There's not a twitch we can't predict, except one's own aghast grimace.Daniel Thomas pointed out in her 1974 show at Bonython the link between Leveson's screen printing, through the use of stencils, with her painting, describing the effect in her "Optic Series" as "like looking at a pale Rothko through a flyscreen." Thomas noted that she was then selling works at around $1,000. Leveson in interview said the effect was inspired on her overseas residencies during which she took photographs of mist and fog, "showing images behind a curtain, a natural haze."