The Fall/Winter Edition 2020

VICTOR JUHASZ

Interview with Lon Levin

In high school I did a lot of the artwork for the school paper and other activities but never really seriously considered it as a career. In senior year my art teacher asked me what my plans were after graduation. I had some offbeat fantasy of being a cross country truck driver and told him. He did the modern equivalent of an eye roll and took me down to the office to fill out applications to art schools. I was eventually accepted by the Parsons School of Design. He saw something I didn’t and pushed me to take advantage of my talent. A perfect case of how important an influence a teacher can be in a young person’s life. . What kind of kid were you? Where did you grow up? What were your influences?

When did you first think about art/illustration as something you wanted to do? Were you encouraged or discouraged by family, friends, teachers, mentors?

I had been drawing ever since a kid; in the course of my psychotherapy many years ago we explored the connection between my earliest drawings being of war scenes and my parents’ very unhappy, quarrelsome relationship. There was near constant war at home and there was war in my drawings. My father, who worked in a factory, was also a frustrated artist, who started a correspondence illustration course. He worked on his lessons through the night. It eventually affected his health and he stopped. He packed his materials up in a suitcase and put it upstairs in the attic. As a kid I would often go up to the attic and look through his assignments. I think in some very subtle

I grew up in New Jersey, first generation American born to immigrants. My influences growing up were the marvelous Max Fleischer Popeye, Betty Boop, KoKo the Clown cartoons , the fantastic Looney Tunes of Robert Clampett, Robert McKimson, Tex Avery, Carl Stalling, Chuck Jones, Disney animations, early MAD Magazine, Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, great visual, slapstick style comedy that was frequently aired on TV at the time. I loved the American Heritage history publications and was mesmerized by so many of the illustrations printed in those issues, especially the battle scenes. I would find myself trying to replicate those great paintings of battles. My folks were traumatized survivors of World War II, my mother a survivor of Soviet concentration camps. As I mentioned before they were not a compatible couple. I was a very fearful, fear driven kid, awkward, not great at baseball or other sports, very insecure. Once in art school I redirected my anxieties into working hard and being the best I could. The anxieties didn’t go away but for a few years they were suppressed.

What’s your background and how does it relate to what you’re doing now?

I graduated Parsons in ’75 wanting to do both caricature and satirical illustration. Illustrators like David Levine, Ed Sorel, Rick Meyerowitz were serious influences. But I was also captivated by the work of Howard Brodie...To be continued