Muralist Sol Levenson has just painted a woman bending over to pick apples. One minute she is in the foreground and the next, her apple-picking days are over. Levenson decides to white her out of the picture. “She was getting all the attention. In a mural, there must be interest all over,” he explains. “Besides, I’m so happy making a mistake. Here’s a chance to make it better. When you get so old that you don’t know you’re making mistakes, then it’s time to worry.”
Levenson, 95, has no time to worry. He is busy with his current project, a three-panel portrayal of the Civil War at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Hospital in Lebanon, N.H., where since 1990 he has painted 17 historical murals. (Among his other subjects: the Shaker sect, Native Americans and a New England fair.)
He is also writing a book on the history of drawing, teaching female inmates at a Vermont state prison how to make a landscape mural and starting sketches for a portrait commission. Oh, and this fall he’s off on a Fulbright fellowship to Colombia for two months, where he will teach painting in Spanish, a language he taught himself at 64. He has won two other Fulbrights to Latin America in the past decade.
From his home in nearby White River Junction, Vt., Levenson drives to Dartmouth-Hitchcock in his 1988 stick-shift Chevrolet Nova. He does all his murals–for which he charges only the cost of materials–in the oncology section because his mother and the first of his three wives died of cancer.
“The patients’ conversations feed me–they keep me alert,” says Levenson, who places an empty chair next to his easel to invite kibitzing while he works. The stimulation is mutual. “Sol is nothing short of spectacular,” says Dr. Eugen Hug, chief of radiation oncology at the cancer center.
“His sheer presence and energy are inspiring to everyone. When you see someone his age having this tremendous mental agility and creativity, he becomes a role model, whether he wants to or not.” Radiation oncology nurse Anita Concilio believes that Levenson “reminds patients that life goes on, even with a cancer diagnosis. That he is working into his mid-90s and has so much to offer gives us all hope.”
One patient who was particularly inspired by Levenson was Janice Munro, a former nurse who had bilateral breast cancer. When Munro arrived for her first radiation session four years ago, she spotted Levenson in the corner, painting. “There was so much energy and life in those murals, and that’s what I wanted back in my life,” she recalls.
“When I looked at his murals, I forgot about the cancer and felt healthy. He lives life to its fullest every single day, and I realized that’s what I had to do too.” Today Munro, 62, acts as Levenson’s assistant, handing him paints, brushes and paper from a converted hospital cart and helping to paint backgrounds.
Levenson works quickly (and without eyeglasses, thanks to two cataract surgeries), making progress that patients can follow daily. He draws everything from memory, a skill he continually hones. While watching a boxing match on television at home, for instance, he will turn away and draw what he has seen. “I freeze it in my mind and make the sketches,” he says. “It’s what I call my roadwork.”
A stickler for historical accuracy, he researches his murals in libraries and specialized museums. For his Civil War mural, a member of the hospital staff who belongs to a Civil War reenactment group gave Levenson photos of Union and Confederate uniforms. The painter confers with him regularly to make sure even the smallest details are right, from the shape of the rims of the soldiers’ eyeglasses to their shoelaces.
Much of Levenson’s work depicts old-fashioned working-class life–people felling trees, mining a granite quarry, repairing locomotives, working a farm. That reflects his own blue collar background in Danvers, Mass. His Russian-immigrant parents were poor, but his mother, a seamstress, and father, a tailor, bequeathed good genes to Levenson and his three younger sisters. Today two sisters are also in their 90s, and the “baby” will be 87 on Sept. 30.
Levenson, who yearned to be an illustrator, was able to attend the Massachusetts College of Art but left during the Depression. The only work he could find was shining shoes, working in ditches installing water pipes, felling trees and stripping hides in a tannery. After landing a job during the New Deal with the federal Works Progress Administration, he helped paint two historical murals in Danvers, one depicting the battle of Bunker Hill.
From there he became a draftsman at an electric company in Ipswich, Mass., a greeting-card designer in Long Island City, N.Y., an illustrator and graphic designer in Boston and an art teacher at a vocational high school in Quincy, Mass. But on weekends, throughout all his job changes, he faithfully plugged away at portraits, landscapes and other kinds of painting.
At 73, Levenson retired to Vermont. As a hobby, he began sketching scenes of concerts at nearby Dartmouth College. An art professor saw his work and offered him a show. He was also volunteering at Dartmouth-Hitchcock’s cancer center doing advertising and layout when, in 1990, he noticed spacious, empty walls in the oncology department and made his move.
Despite painfully arthritic knees that sometimes require him to use a cane, the 6-ft. 3-in. Levenson remains a vigorous figure. His only explanation for his longevity is that “it all adds up: exercise, enthusiasm and loving what I’m doing. Every minute is a joy.”
His life is a blur of activity. He lives alone in his white, Cape Cod–style house, where he often cooks for friends or lifts light weights. His paintings hang everywhere, including around bookcases and over the wood stove. Hundreds of sketches are stacked up in his studio, a converted bedroom. “You haven’t seen messy till you’ve seen my studio,” he says cheerfully.
On any given evening, he might sketch changes he wants to make the next day on his Civil War mural or work on his book or review Spanish grammar so he’ll be ready for South America or ponder how he is going to compose a concert scene for a recently commissioned mural.
“While working on one mural, I make sketches for the next and think about the third,” he says. “I’m like a theater stock company that does one play a week, rehearsing next week’s play and reading the play for the week after!” For performing his repertory so brilliantly, Levenson wins unstinting applause and rave reviews.
