In 2012, when she was 60 years old, Ruth Parker Lefko ’74 retired from teaching kindergarten through fourth grade at multiple schools throughout North Carolina and Virginia. Her teaching career, for which her Elementary Education major at Pfeiffer College had prepared her, was meaningful, but she was ready to pursue a new line of work.

She began painting prolifically, building a following and connecting with people all over via her website. She reignited an interest in making art that had lain largely dormant for 37 years while she taught, and while she and her husband Carl Lefko ’76, also a Pfeiffer alumnus, raised two daughters. Carl, whom she met as a student at Pfeiffer, is the son of Nick Lefko ’37, who coached soccer at Pfeiffer from 1959-74.

“Painting has always been a part of me, but I had to put it on the back burner,” Ruth Lefko said recently from her home in Christiansburg, Va, near where her husband taught technical theatre at Radford University. “Now, I’m motivated to get up and do it every day. I have a purpose. This is my purpose now.”

That purpose has also included managing galleries, teaching other painters, and serving as the Co-Vice President of the Blacksburg (Va.) Regional Art Association. It began to emerge when Lefko, who originally hails from New London, N.C., began taking private art lessons as a teenager. She majored in art for one year at Brevard College, then transferred to Pfeiffer.

By that time, she had decided to focus on preparing for a career in elementary education, having concluded that painting would not pay the bills. She has happy memories of her student days at Pfeiffer and called the late Dr. Phyllis Gore Houghton a “wonderful person.” Houghton directed Education at Pfeiffer for many years.

When she was teaching elementary school children, Lefko “dragged” herself out of bed early to do it. Now, on most days, she rises enthusiastically at 4 a.m. to paint in her home studio. Painting has become such an important part of her life that if a week goes by without her doing it, she begins to feel irritable. If she and her husband go on a trip, she makes painting a part of the journey.

Lefko describes her painting process as an “emotional” experience, one in which several pieces are in development. Unlike many of her painter colleagues, who tend to work on one piece until it’s done, Lefko likes to revisit paintings she’s set aside and look at them with fresh eyes.

“Maybe I could do this to that, or I could do that to that,” she said, describing the thinking behind her creative process. “If you don’t want to do it, you trust your gut not to do it.”

Lefko has developed a good sense of what she’s all about as an artist. She has come to embrace what she calls “the element of surprise, which is big for me.” Her portfolio includes abstracts, portraits of animals, seascapes, still lifes, florals, and landscapes. She now prefers creating vibrant non-representational fare while occasionally accepting commissions to paint real-world subject matter in line with a client’s wishes. “I could paint pet portraits, but it’s not what brings me as much joy as just going in there and moving the paint around and letting the paint do the work,” she said. “I prefer to paint for myself. And then that makes it even nicer when somebody else appreciates it and wants it.”

This article was written for Pfeiffer University by Ken Keuffel.