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Arts & Entertainment

Forest Hills Faux Design Artist Is For Real

Artist's designs are as versatile as they are alluring.

Looking for a poker theme — hearts, spades, diamonds, clubs — for your dinner table? How about fake cracks artfully strewn across your bedroom walls or a Chinese country scene on your Lazy Susan?

Forest Hills artist Nancy Levine has some designs for you.

After decades in the food industry, the Yellowstone Boulevard resident retouched her career last year by going faux. Now she spends her days painting, ironing, decoupaging and even scrubbing designs onto furniture and other items.

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"I could paint a rug on your floor," she said, adding: "You can't sweep anything under the rug."

Levine, whose clientele is mostly word-of-mouth at present, specializes in Lazy Susans or what she likes to call "table spinners." Her modus operandi usually involves getting circular cuts of wood from a lumberyard. She then sands and  primes them before deciding their artistic fate.

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"I look at them and say 'speak to me,'" she said.

Sometimes she paints flowers and hearts on a table spinner. Other times she finds a fabric and irons it into the middle, while painting the outside rim in a color she mixes. And then there are times when she opts for pasting and ironing labels on the spinner.

"I can't think inside the box," she said.

Levine's moment of enlightenment happened a few years ago, when she was working for a food importer. She saw a few Lazy Susans and a light went on in her head.

"I said 'what's the purpose?' They're not really pretty [or] useful," she said.

Soon thereafter, Levine founded her design company, Faux Posh. She rented an office at the Entrepreneur’s Space, a Long Island City building that offers low-cost worksites to budding business people. Then she started plying her craft with a real sense of purpose.

In fact, things are going so well that Levine thinks she's set for her senior years.

"I'm going to paint my way through life," she said.

For more information about Levine's art, try 718-459-4111 or fauxposh@nyc.rr.com. Please see the photos that accompany this article.

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