Theodora Zavala rediscovers her art

Art had always been a part of East Meadow resident Theodora Zavala’s life, but it wasn’t until her 50s that she started to focus more on her craft. Now, the retired city school teacher spends her days painting.

Zavala, 73, specializes in oil paintings of landscapes and still life. She’s also dabbled in working on portraits. Now, her work is being featured in the East Meadow Public Library for the month of February.

“It’s the way I think I looked at things,” Zavala said about always being interested in art. “I would always look at something, and look at the light, how it falls. I do photography also, and even if I don’t actually sketch it, I kind of look at it and get a certain feeling from it, and maybe I’ll do something like that in the future.”

She was born in Washington Heights, but moved to Massachusetts when she was eight. She stayed there for a while but eventually her family made their way back to New York, where Zavala finished out her school years at Jamaica High School in Queens.

Her senior year of high school was really when her passion for art formed. “When I was a senior, that’s when I first started to really get into my art,” she explained. “We really didn’t have that much in school, so when I was in high school, we studied drawing from life, and I did some figure drawing.”

Zavala said that she even had a teacher, Jesse Fuchs, who recommended that after high school she take classes at the Art Student League of New York in Manhattan to really hone her artistic skill. “I did it for about a year,” she said. “I was studying drawing the figure. It wasn’t that hard for me, it was a good experience.”

She received her bachelor’s degree in art from Queens College. After graduating she worked for McCall Patterns, where she illustrated how to sew things together. She worked there for over 10 years before she got a job as a teaching assistant.

In 1984, Zavala moved to East Meadow with her husband, David. The two picked East Meadow because they liked that it was near Jones Beach and the store Fortunoff.

When she was 50, Zavala headed back to school. She attended Hofstra University in Hempstead and got her master’s degree in elementary education.

“I got job in Uniondale as a teaching assistant and I was working with a teacher that was helping kids with math and I was thinking, ‘boy, this does not look that hard,’” Zavala said. “I thought that I could go back and get my degree and become a teacher, so I did.”

She taught for 20 years, and spent most of her time at PS 38 in Rosedale. Surprisingly, she didn’t really want to teach art. Instead, she wanted to teach math. “They told me that I didn’t take enough credits in math in college so I just had a general degree,” she said. “I started teaching fifth grade.”

Zavala taught fifth grade until she was transferred to another school where she taught second grade, before she started teaching art.

“I loved it,” she said. “The kids love to be creative, and they don’t know how creative they are. A lot of these kids would come to me and ask me if they were an artist, and I would always tell them they were.”

She finished out her days at PS 38 teaching art with a mix of teaching second grade.

“I had them doing a lot of fun stuff,” Zavala said. “I had them painting and I would show them different artists and they would try to paint like them.”

When she started teaching, her love for art started to blossom again. She started taking classes on pastel portraits with Master Pastelist, Dan Slapo. She also took classes to learn oil portraits with Rob Silverman and oil landscapes with Howard Rose. All of which she did after her school day.

“It was really good,” Zavala said of getting back into art. “I love doing it and it was so amazing, I would always surprise myself.”

Zavala has showcased her art in shows at Queens College, the Broome Street Gallery in Soho, the East Meadow Library and various art leagues. She’s received awards from the Art Guild, the National Art League, the Suburban Art League, the Long Beach Art League, the East Meadow Library in juried show, and from the Town of Hempstead.

“I love discovering new things about paint, like maybe a combination of colors or mixing the colors, Zavala said. “I just like to challenge myself a lot.”