OSU professor finds philosophy in painting
Twelve years ago, T.M. Rudavsky — then in her 50s and a philosophy professor at Ohio State University — had never picked up a paintbrush.
When her daughter, an elementary school student at Columbus School for Girls, brought home her paintings from art class, Rudavsky remembers being fascinated and envious.
“I had never done anything in art before, but I wanted to do that,” she said. “I found a teacher and took drawing lessons, then painting lessons.”
Rudavsky began working with black and white paints, then added colors. She painted the flowers in the garden of her Clintonville home. Working in plein air, or outdoors, in all seasons, she captured woods and parks in central Ohio. She painted seasides in California, where her adult children live. And she found subjects around the world — in Israel and Greece, for example — while attending conferences for her work as a professor.
This fall, at the OSU Faculty Club, Rudavsky, 69, has a one-woman exhibit of 47 paintings, mostly landscapes of locations reflected in the exhibit title: “Here, There and Yonder.”
Her works are carefully composed scenes of trees, plants, water, forests, hillsides and more that pay careful attention to light and the shadows it creates. Rudavsky is quite good at capturing the quiet power of a sunlit, winter afternoon.
The exhibit includes scenes of local parks (“Whetstone Gazebo,” “Schiller Park, High Summer”); floral scenes (“Ned’s Hollyhocks,” “Peonies at Last”); winter landscapes (“First Snow, Whetstone Bridge,” “Whetstone Creek”); and
paintings of far-flung locations (“Jerusalem, Old City Wall Overlook,” “Overlooking the Sea, Paros, Greece”).
One work, “In Defiance,” captures an array of flowers flourishing beside a fence. The work is so titled because Rudavsky’s son, not especially complementary of his mother’s artistic efforts, suggested she returned to painting in black and white. She didn’t — and depicted the lush variety of flowers in a riot of colors.
Rudavsky said that her work as a philosophy professor does cross over into her painting.
“My area is metaphysics, which has to do with the nature of reality — what’s out there,” she said. “I’m also obsessed with the concept of time and, as a plein air painter, you have maybe two hours (of similar outdoor light and conditions) and you have to choose the moment.”
Rudavsky said that she continues to study painting, taking classes with artists more seasoned than herself, including central Ohio painters Joe Lombardo and Fred Fochtman.
She talks about the joy she takes in “rendering the temporal a thing of beauty.”
“I absolutely love to paint,” she said. “If I set up to paint, I don’t feel the time go by at all.”
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