GRF director’s cardboard creation wins award
By Patty Marsters
pattym@lwsb.com
Carol Levine has always been an artist. “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t scribbling, drawing or doodling something,” she says.
TheGRFdirectorfromMutual 10 and longtime Leisure World Art League member has painted with watercolors and sculpted with clay and even, once, marble, but LW’s recent Cool Creations Cardboard Contest inspired her to try something new. “This was my first time using cardboard,” Levine says. “It holds its shape better than clay.”
Among the creations displayed in the roundabout by the LW Library last month was Levine’s dog-and-squirrel combo. A playful pup, his red tongue lolling out, peers at a bushy squirrel descending a tree; hidden on the other side of the trunk was a lizard and a fuzzy mouse. It was a scene of corrugated joy and wonder.
But LWers weren’t the only ones who were given the opportunity to judge this beauty. Levine, a member of the Huntington Beach Art League, saw a call for submissions to a virtual contest in the league’s newsletter. She’d entered the group’s contests before, mostly paintings, she says. And while she waited for the mid-January submission date for LW’s contest, she posted photos of her cardboard creation to the HB Art League’s Facebook group. According to The Mixed Media, the league newsletter, 35 artists posted 75 entries to its monthly contest, and Levine’s work “garnered a record 40-plus ‘likes.’” It was also, notably, the first time a three-dimensional piece had been entered in the group’s online shows.
The votes netted Levine a Viewers’ Choice Award, as well as a gift card to Art Supply Warehouse.
Though she initially wanted to coat her creation with wax, then take it to a foundry to be bronzed (“But that was outside my budget,” she says, laughing), she ended up parting with the perky pup part of the work. “Someone in the Huntington Beach Art League asked me how much I want for it,” she recalls with a chuckle, “and I said, ‘Make me an offer!’” During the pandemic, she has kept busy with other projects, including a couple of commissioned pet portraits for her neighbors. “Art is my thing,” she says.
LW looks forward to whatever she creates next.
