Late-blooming artist makes up for lost time
Zeva Lucas didn't start painting until she was past 40 years old, but the now nearly 90-year-old has made up for lost time.
In the last five decades, Lucas has painted “thousands” of pieces of art, she said.
The Center Township resident who grew up in Ridgeville said she loved coloring with crayons as a child and painted a little bit, but “I just scribbled around,” she said.
“After my kids were grown and married, I started painting. I paint on everything,” Lucas said.
And by everything, she means canvases as well as old saws, milk cans, glass, bark, slate, shovels, “anything people brought me.”
She paints with acrylics mostly. “I used to paint with oil paint but I got allergic to it, and it takes so long to dry,” she said.
One of her most well-known paintings is of Drake Well in Titusville. She had 100 prints made of that painting showing the structure where the oil and gas industry began, and one of the prints was accepted by the administration of Pennsylvania Gov. Dick Thornburgh as a permanent donation to the commonwealth collection.
Lucas has sold many of her paintings and has given many away.
She recently hand-painted 30 greeting cards with winter scenes and donated them to Newhaven Court, where she lives, as a fundraiser.“I paint a lot from people who go on their honeymoons and take a picture and want a painting of it,” she said.Not all subjects have been literal. “I make up a lot of them,” she said.Among the thousands of paintings signed simply “Zeva,” she said she has no favorites. “I like them all,” she said.With a bin of paint tubes and a cup of brushes beside her bed, Lucas paints a little bit most days of the week, she said, near a window with a lamp beside her chair. She just rests the canvas on her lap.“I thank the Lord every night for the talents he gave me. I never had a lesson.”“I can't write very well anymore,” she said.But she can paint.
