about.cfm - a work by Thomas Leveritt

Thomas Leveritt is half-American, half-British, and 34. He has won the Carroll Medal for Portraiture from the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, a Betty Trask Award for a first novel and a Somerset Maugham Award for the same book.

His novel, The Exchange-rate Between Love and Money, was published in February 2008, and variously described as 'dazzling' (The Guardian), 'crazed and hilarious' (New Statesman), and a 'love story, tone poem, and seething meditation on history and politics... by turns exuberant, furious, bawdy, and mournful' (The New Yorker), with a 'frankly awful jacket, designed by the author' (good old Daily Mail). Other reviews: The Daily Telegraph, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times, The Independent, Aesthetica Magazine, The Sunday Business Post, Texas Monthly, Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus, The Barnes & Noble Review, Tatler, and Arena. Amazon UK page here. He has written elsewhere for The Spectator, The Independent and The Guardian.

Interview in the Guardian, April 2008
Profiled in The Big Issue, February 2008
Interview in 3AM Magazine, September 2008
Fun facts about the author at Simon & Schuster, April 2009
Profiled in the Financial Times, June 2002

The Artist's Statement.

Pictures are only worth a thousand words in certain specific and spatially complex cases, like to explain topography or furniture-assembly. In most other cases, for example choosing chicken or beef, words are the right tool for the job. Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow weighs in at 764 pages - which is let's say 400,000 words (words incidentally laid out in the best order yet devised); you'd be hard-pressed to convey that symphonically elaborate universe in 400 pictures. Someone did try, but all they proved was that Pynchon's words are heavier than normal words; perhaps by as much as 7 or 8 millipictures.

But for conveying personality, the picture still can't be beat. It deploys a kiloword of information in a second. Granted, this only holds over a short period, whereas words give a steadier data transfer, though with diminishing returns. It's probably logarithmic.

The point is: same art, different medium.

In all cases - in writing no less than in portraiture - the aim is to simulate human warmth out of lifeless ingredients, and the degree to which this is successful is the degree to which the art is any 'good'. That's not to say 'important' or 'valuable'; merely good. Now quality is a tricky thing to define, but if the emotional signal given off by an artwork can be said to have both direction and amplitude, then let's define quality as amplitude. And in fact, if the emotional signal given off by anything has both direction and amplitude, then we can compare all forms of expenditure on an axis: what's the total lifetime mood-alteration I will receive from $1000 spent on this painting versus those books, versus a holiday, versus an MBA, versus this bag of drugs? They're all just different sectors of the mood-alteration business.