About Susan LeVine
Santa Barbara artist Susan LeVine was born and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee where her love of nature was first ignited. After graduating from the University of Colorado, Susan had a business designing window and in-store displays for Denver area boutiques. However, a passion for art led her on a different course. This journey began with a year of study in Italy where she was immersed in the beauty of artistic expression and the romance of the Italian culture. She returned to the United States and completed her masters in Art History at the University of Chicago. Though Susan worked in various capacities in the art world, her greatest use of her masters was to awaken her own sensibility as an artist.
Susan had the privilege of being a William T. Colville grant recipient that allowed her to paint the beauty of nature in her Southern California surroundings and was selected to paint a Steelhead Trout by the Community Environmental Council which adorned State Street in 2007. Susan spent many years painting portraits of homes for realtors and private home owners in the Midwest, Montecito, and Santa Barbara. Eventually her ongoing love of birds and nature became her greatest muse. Susan only paints birds and landscapes that she has seen first hand so that she captures the feeling of witnessing a moment in nature. As a fine artist, she has exhibited in several galleries in Chicago and and presently at Upstairs at Pierre La Fond in Montecito.
Always inspired by the beauty of the natural world, her paintings reflect her love of nature and a desire to encourage the love of nature in others. Prior to focusing on painting Susan was the artist of Uccellino (which means little bird in Italian), where she designed products to uplift the spirits of others and share a sense of wonder and celebration of life. Susan started her company by hiring students from the Chicago Art Institute to come to her home and help assemble products from 9 pm to 2 am after her daughter went to sleep. These crazy hours led Susan to seek out a relationship with Recycled Paper Greetings. They happily made her initial products and gave her the mentoring that she needed to start her own company and manufacture products herself. After years of trade shows, manufacturing, and all that goes into making a company, she chose to license her designs to larger companies who could make her designs while she concentrated on making new offerings, especially paintings. She has licensed her designs and verse to such companies as Recycled Paper Greetings, Uncommon Goods, Paragon and Creative Co-op. Susan has sold designs for book illustrations, covers, prints and logo designs. Susan welcomes an opportunity to make exclusive paintings for private collections. She loves to meet with her clients and create paintings that speak to their individual lives and the unique spaces that they live in adding beauty and joy to their corner of the world.
