The Art of His Life

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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 re-enactment 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.