Santa Barbara artist Susan LeVine was born and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee where her love of nature was first ignited. After graduating from the University of Colorado, Ms. LeVine had a business designing window and in-store displays for Denver area boutiques. However, a passion for art led her on a different course. This journey began with a year of study in Italy where she was immersed in the beauty of artistic expression and the romance of the Italian culture. She returned to the United States and completed her masters in Art History at the University of Chicago. Though Susan worked in various capacities in the art world, her greatest use of her masters was to awaken her own sensibility as an artist.

Susan had the privilege of being a William T.Colville grant recipient and was selected to paint a Steelhead Trout by the Community Environmental Council which adorned State Street in 2007. Ms. LeVine has been know also for painting portraits of homes for realtors and by private commissions both in the Midwest and in Montecito and Santa Barbara. Susan’s paintings of birds and landscapes are probably the greatest expression of her love of nature. Susan only paints birds and landscapes that she has seen first hand so that she captures the feeling of seeing a moment in nature. As a fine artist she has exhibited in several galleries in Chicago and has exhibited in many of the SCAPE (Southern California Artists Painting the Environment) shows in Santa Barbara.

Always inspired by the beauty of the natural world, her paintings reflect a desire to encourage an appreciation of nature. As the artist of Uccellino (which means little bird in Italian),she has designed products to uplift the spirits of others and share a sense of wonder and celebration of life. Susan started her company by hiring students from the Chicago Art Institute to come to her home and help assemble products from 9 pm to 2 am after her daughter went to sleep at night. These crazy hours led Susan to seek out a relationship with Recycled Paper Greetings. They happily made her initial products and gave her the mentoring that she needed to start her company and manufacture products herself. After years of trade shows and manufacturing and all that goes into making a company she chose to license her designs to larger companies who could make her designs while she concentrated on making new product designs and paintings. She licenses her designs and verse to such companies as Recycled Paper Greetings, Uncommon Goods, Paragon and Creative Co-op. Susan has sold designs for book illustrations, covers, prints and logo designs. Susan welcomes an opportunity to make exclusive paintings for private collections. She loves to meet with her clients and create paintings that speak to their individual lives and the unique spaces that they live in.

Contact Ms. LeVine @ (805) 450-4122 or  sdlart@gmail.com