Rebecca J. Levitan, Visual Arts

THC: What is the artistic thing that you do?

RJL: I’m a VES major, and so what I spend most of my artistic life doing is making artwork. This year I’ve been working on a series of paintings for my thesis that are produced through layers of silkscreens that I make from photocopies.

THC: What is the defining moment of your arts career at Harvard?

RJL: My first painting class at Harvard—“Painting Day and Night.”  It was the first time I had worked in oil paint and it was a double realization for me: first that I loved painting as a medium, and second that I had to stop putting off being as committed as I wanted to be to art.  I kept being afraid of taking art because I thought it would take over everything else if I did it as much I as I wanted to.  I was right, but what I didn’t realize was that was actually a good thing.

THC: How do you think you’ll look back on your college work?

RJL: I’m sure I’ll look back on it and cringe. But I don’t think that is necessarily a bad thing … The more I go back to my old work, the more I see ideas that I have since abandoned that might be worth taking up again or a way of working that was less polished but maybe more adventurous