Jessica Levant is a native San Franciscan who decamped to New York and London for 30 years, returning ‘home’ in the late 90s. Always ‘interested’ in art, she didn’t consider herself a serious artist until returning to San Francisco when she re-designed her career and her life. Jessica is mainly self-taught. She defines 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’.
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. But wait – there’s more.
During the Covid-19 Lockdown period, she took a deep dive into making art that wasn’t locked in her laptop. By the end of 2020, she produced scores mixed media abstract collages and then moved on to paint where she now finds herself fully in the abstract expressionist camp. She learned some basic 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 so that she now can’t seem to stop painting. She lives in the midst of her studio/workshop/gallery also known as a one-bedroom apartment.
Jessica’s photo art has been selected in 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 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.
