MARGARET LEVESONS HOLDING ON AND RK MILLSS THE MEADOW PAINTINGS

Mills, Biodiversity Equity

LONGYEAR GALLERY, JULY 4th – AUGUST 3rd, 2025

OPENING RECEPTION: SATURDAY, JULY 5th, 3-5 P.M.

MARGARETVILLE – Longyear Gallery of Margaretville is pleased to announce the opening of two featured artists’ solo exhibitions: Margaret Leveson’s “Holding On” and RK Mills’s “The Meadow Paintings.” These exhibitions will be accompanied by a group show featuring the art of all other Longyear Gallery members. Opening on Friday, July 4th, these exhibitions will run through Sunday, August 3rd with the Artists’ Reception on Saturday, July 5th from 3-5 p.m. 

Margaret Leveson’s new solo exhibit “Holding On” takes its name from the artist’s experience of working on a painting of two birds perched precariously on a cliff that she had seen and photographed while hiking up Chimney Rock with her husband in New Mexico. As Leveson explains, “It occurred to me that it was a perfect title for a group of paintings that I was working on. It fit both literally and figuratively. But what was drawing me to these subjects?” For Leveson, her painting of a Great Blue Heron huddled against the wintery weather with upside down trees reflected in the water represents the heron’s mood of resignation, its ‘’Holding On.” Another of these new paintings, “November Sun,” depicts, according to the artist, “a road disappearing around a bend with a lone group of trees holding on to their yellowed leaves, which a low sun reaches out to, a reflection of the approaching winter.” In asking herself why she likes expressing her feelings through the use of birds in her paintings, Leveson thinks “it’s because they know how to ‘Hold On.’ Perhaps because they haven’t destroyed their environment.”

Though some of the paintings in “Holding On” were painted directly outside, her preferred way to paint, Leveson has also relied on photographs she’s taken because of her inability to physically handle working outdoors, she explains. She has been painting mostly in two locations, the Catskills, where she and her husband bought a house in 1977, and the parks near her house in Brooklyn, principally Prospect Park. Leveson work in oils and pastels, “two media which give me the flexibly to maneuver the image.” 

Margaret Leveson received a BA in Fine Arts from the University of Toronto and, after working at the Vancouver Art Gallery, moved to New York City where she settled and obtained an MFA in Fine Arts from Brooklyn College. In 1980, she helped found Blue Mountain Gallery in Manhattan, where she continues to exhibit, and in 2007, she participated in founding Longyear Gallery in Margaretville, New York, where she also exhibits regularly. In recent years she has exhibited annually in the AMR studio tour.  

RK Mills’s new solo exhibition, “The Meadow Paintings (Meadow Changes/Paintings Evolve),” grew out of his time spent managing and observing a two-acre meadow outside his studio in Bovina, NY for the last 15 years. As MiIls notes, “Immediate neighbors mow their fields and grass lawn becomes a monoculture. Wild meadows are biodiverse, feeding and sheltering countless species of insects, amphibia, birds, and mammals. With humility I have introduced additional native species, introduced trails, added an area using a plant palette developed by the Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf (High Line, Battery Park City, others), and watched as dominant plants like milkweed, goldenrod, wild bee balm, thistle, mullein, dock, and countless others assert themselves.” During those years he made observational paintings of the constantly changing meadow during varying times of day and seasons. In this exhibit, Mills explains, “I have included various stylistic responses, some playing with art historical figures that I particularly admire, becoming riffs on a theme. One painting even posits the question “What if halfway through Mondrian’s development to his late abstractions, he reversed course and headed back to nature?”

RK Mills painted in graduate school at City College of New York, followed by devoting himself to printmaking from 1975-1995. A number of editions of his work were co-published by Orion Editions. He was a master printer at Rose Hill Editions in NYC, taught printmaking at the Pratt Graphics Center, was the first president of the Manhattan Graphics Center, and directed Long Island University’s Post Campus’s print and paper making program for 28 years as a Professor of Art. From 1996-2010 his work shifted into eco-art, environmental art, and public art projects focusing on the damaged New Jersey Wetlands. Since 2010 he has been painting fulltime.

Future Summer and Early Fall 2025 Longyear Gallery exhibits include two concurrent solo exhibitions featuring the art of Longyear Gallery members Robert Axelrod and Helane Levine-Keating running from Friday, August 8th-Sunday, September 7th with the Artists’ Reception on Saturday, August 9th from 3-5 p.m., followed by two concurrent solo exhibitions featuring the art of Robin S. Halpern and Hedi Kyle, running from Friday, September 12th-Sunday, October 13th, with the Artists’ Reception on Saturday, September 13th from 3-5 p.m.  All solo exhibitions will be accompanied by a Members’ Group Show.

Longyear Gallery’s exhibitions “Holding On” by Margaret Leveson and ”The Meadow Paintings” by RK Mills will be on view Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, and Holiday Mondays each weekend from 12 p.m.-5 p.m.  Longyear Gallery is located Downstairs in The Commons, 785 Main Street, Margaretville. For information, please see Longyear Gallery’s website, www.longyeargallery.org, or call 845.586.3270 during gallery hours.