Ronnie Levine

I've painted in Central Park, at the South Street Seaport, inside the Metropolitan Museum, and since 1997 I've been doing landscapes of the Hudson River, street scenes of the charming towns along it, and portraits of some of the people I've met along the way. One person who commissioned artwork from me for his family's shop, Main Street Sweets in Tarrytown, was a police detective, and my friendship with him inspired my mystery novel, The Ice Cream Shop Detective. It's about an artist like me who agrees to help with an art forgery investigation in a manner she expects to be academic, but she soon finds herself getting in the way of a murderer. The book is partly about quality in art, as she explains to the detective how she tells a lower-quality work from a masterpiece. And it's suspenseful too! My own painting technique is traditional oil painting with an emphasis on color, light, and emotional nuance.  Each painting is like a gateway to a world beyond, which the viewer can imagine. Artists of the past who have been significant influences include Hopper, Monet, Manet, Vermeer, and Sargent. See examples on www.rivertownpainter.com. Whenever possible I work from life rather than from photographs, having studied at the International Center of Photography, where I developed an understanding of the differences between images produced by hand versus those done by camera.  I make exceptions for paintings that are going to be surprise gifts, or portraits of busy people, or of houses in winter, but ideally I prefer to meet the portrait subject or go on location for an outdoor scene at least a few times during the course of the painting to compare it with the real thing.  When using photos, I prefer to do my own shoot. I write non-fiction, too, as you can see on my other website, www.the-artist-eye.com.   I did approximately fifty articles for Tarrytown Patch in 2010-11, some on my own art technique and others on local exhibitions. Look for links to some of them on www.the-artists-eye.com, where you'll also find some of my earlier articles for Tarrytown's River Journal. I've done several profiles for Westchester Magazine (www.westchestermagazine.com), and some articles for  www.communitymediaonhudson.org.

I studied painting at a variety of places including the Art Students League in New York City and the Art Institute of Boston. I spent two years on my own at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York doing copies and, with the museum's permission, two original paintings of its galleries. Before art, I studied psychology up to the graduate level, which, although I didn't stay in the field professionally, informed my perception of trends in contemporary art and enabled me to stay true to my own vision.