Joan levy hepburn biography of michael

Joan Levy Hepburn has been making art and music since early childhood.

Born in 1954 in Louisville, Kentucky, a three-month-old budding artist moved to a suburb of New Haven, Connecticut, where her father began his career as a Neurologist at Yale University.
The choice to attend Buxton School in Williamstown, Massachusetts would prove to be a life-altering decision.

By the time Joan arrived at Buxton, she was already a seasoned painter. She met Willem de Kooning when he visited the school and admired one of her paintings hanging on the wall in the dining room. They shared an instant chemistry through painting and he became her personal mentor for the rest of his life. De Kooning warned against the traps of academic art education. After high school, Joan made regular trips for a few years to de Kooning’s studio to learn from him. Then, he guided her through accelerated college art degrees at Rhode Island School of Design and Kansas City Art Institute. He had disdain for closed-minded classifications. He referenced the entire gamut of art history in a non-linear path to be borrowed as needed. As he said, “It is all painting!” They shared an admiration for Cezanne. Joan continued to make regular visits to de Kooning's studio until he died.

Joan also found a music mentor.  At the age of seven, she heard a record by Dave Van Ronk. That began her life’s journey in music, which started on her grandmother’s Gibson guitar. She played old English ballads, blues, and folk music by ear until she met Dave Van Ronk at the age of 20. She traded paintings for guitar lessons with Dave in finger style blues and ragtime music. Their mutual fascination of music and painting sparked discussions that Joan translated into color palettes. She began to see how color could communicate direct emotional and physical sensations to the audience. Since then, painting and music have been joined in her perception and creation of art.

Landscape has always been the vehicle for her expression in painting and drawing. Her favorite painters in this realm are Bruegel, Turner, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Cole, Church, Bierstadt, Hartley, Dove, and Lawren Harris. Joan has traveled to the American Northeast, Southwest, The Rockies, and the Canadian wilderness to capture the light, color and atmosphere of those places.