David Levine was born in 1926 in Brooklyn, New York. Levine began drawing at a young age and when he was nine he received an invitation to audition for an animator's position in Disney's Los Angeles Studios. Levine later studied painting at the Pratt Institute. Immediately after WWII Levine served in the US army and after his service he graduated from Temple Universities Tyler School of Arts. Levine initially hoped to be a full-time painter, but was often forced to subsist on illustration work from publications like Gasoline Retailer. Nevertheless, he turned out a body of paintings, although many of these were destroyed in a fire in 1968. Levine's paintings are mostly watercolors that often depict garment workers, honoring his father's employees at his clotheing factory, and bathers at Coney Island. Levine, together with Aaron Shikler founded the Painting Group in 1958, a salon of artists with whom he gathered for fifty years to paint models. The group was the subject of a 2007 documentary called Portraits of a Lady, which followed their creation of simultaneous portraits of U. S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. In the 1960's Levine worked as a political illustrator where his work appeared in the Review, Esquire, many other newspapers. In 1967, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member and became a full Academician in 1971.