Like all superintendents, Peter Rutkowski has a to-do list: tend to the boilers, renovate the laundry room, check a water leak. It goes on and on; it’s endless. But most importantly, he must paint. Every day.
Not the walls, though those are often on his list, but on gesso panels inside his living room-turned-studio at Pinewood Gardens, a 90-unit cooperative in Hartsdale, a hamlet in Westchester County just north of New York City.
At 5:30 a.m. on a Tuesday in October, he turned on the piano jazz of “Rainy Day at a Cozy Coffee Shop” on an iPad and sat in front of his easel. On other mornings he listens to rock by the likes of Rod Stewart and Little Richard, pretending his paintbrushes are drumsticks. In front of him was a shadowbox where he had positioned a gourd, a green pumpkin and a tiny bowl of yellow gooseberries atop a green place mat to start a new still life painting — an arrangement that took him a half-hour to organize.
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