Levato Coyne’s drawings are paralinguistic symbolist portraits and still lives. Their linguistic structuring is divorced from linguistic content; meaning is indicated, but encrypted. Each drawing begins with an interior narrative rooted in personal history: a family ejected from the American South that took with them many of the curious beliefs and habits of the Appalachian Mountain Kingdom. The animals and colors in Levato Coyne’s drawings are therefore influenced by the storytelling and imagery of fairytales and wives-tales, as well as medical and zoological antiquity, and farming.
Combining lush realism with an economy of line and negative space helps create a schema that differentiates the human from the flora and fauna that populate the work while, contrarily, breaking down the wall between interior and exterior, reality and non-reality. Dense layers and rich colors drawn without the confines of space and time force the narrator’s story into focus, but the story, though present, remains elusive and undefinable.
Her series “Wolf Peach” is about the way we poison ourselves and those we love.