Do readers know who Madeleine Kunin is? Or Edward DiPrete? Probably not, unless they live in Vermont, where Kunin is running for Governor, or Rhode Island, where DiPrete is also a gubernatorial candidate. They are among six politicians who are featured this week in the first of a series of articles on important local and state races. To give readers an unforgettable visual impression of these individuals, many of whom are not nation ally known, TIME has called upon the U.S.'s premier caricaturist, David Levine. This issue contains his depictions of Kunin and DiPrete, along with spidery portraits of North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms and his challenger, Governor James Hunt.

Levine, 57, whose witty cartoons of political and literary subjects have filled 20 one-man shows and five books, has contributed his skills and savagery to TIME for nearly two decades. In addition to producing dozens of illustrations that have run inside the magazine, he has drawn five cover portraits, including his famous depiction of President Lyndon Johnson as a beset King Lear for TIME'S 1967 Man of the Year issue. Since 1980, Levine's pen has added vivid detail to TIME'S reports on congressional and gubernatorial races. Says he: "Caricature is not portrait painting; you cannot dig that deep. You bring to it your own philosophy--about politics, about life. Mine is that politicians should be jumped on as often as possible."

Levine works only from photographs--"I would be embarrassed to sit in [front of someone and make fun of him"--| and employs superb, old-fashioned draftsmanship to put character before comedy. "I try first to make a face believable," he says, "to give another dimension to a flat, linear drawing. Then my distortions seem more acceptable." While Levine often wields his pen as a poisoned dart, he thinks that there are definite limits to his art. "I might wish to be critical," he admits, "but I don't wish to be destructive. Caricature that goes too far simply lowers the viewer's response to a person as a human being." When he is not drawing caricatures, Levine enjoys painting traditional watercolors. His favorite subjects include women at work in New York City's garment district, where he has observed and sketched them since his boyhood as the son of a dress manufacturer, and at play at Coney Island in his native Brooklyn.

Levine's relationship with TIME is uncaricaturable: "I don't take direction, and the magazine doesn't offer it. I just express exactly what I feel." Says Executive Art Director Nigel Holmes: "Levine has a very strong point of view. He is almost certainly the most brilliant political caricaturist in the world today."