Jon
Levi

a short bio of Jon Levi. 

I was born in New Jersey in ‘68. I picked up a Polaroid in ‘74. I did painting and darkroom work in HS. Shot my first nude when I was 15 and painting figurative works. I started as an artist in earnest when I wore young man’s clothes in my late teens, a painter, a photographer, a steel sculptor at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photography has been my constant in the last 40 years. I didn’t really see photography as a viable direction into itself until well into college, back then I used photography as a tool to capture images that I would later draw, paint and sculpt. I couldn’t afford the models so I’d shoot them instead. Print the images, paint from the images, even include the actual prints into the paintings and paint over them.  In the 70’s, 80’s Playboy magazines in my house as kid was all the rage, Mad Magazine too. Now that i think about it nudes combined with the Mad Magazine ethos, shows up in my photography. In the intervening years photography is my drive to keep my passion as an artist alive.