Isaac Rudansky's artwork has been greeted with great verve and excitement amongst art critics and collectors alike. He has sprung onto the Long Island art scene, with invitations to exhibit his paintings in Southampton, Westhampton, and Montauk – all within the past year. Purchasers of Rudansky's art include a Long Island art instructor and critic, who called Rudansky a "modern master" of calm beneath the chaos of life. Another buyer, a real estate developer and art collector from Manhattan, said he purchased Rudansky's painting as a long term financial investment, thinking it will greatly appreciate in value as the New York art scene continues to embrace Rudansky's work.
Rudansky has been drawing on anything that didn't move since he was a child. His parents enrolled him in art classes as a youngster, but he found the instructions and guidelines formulaic and creatively constricting. He began teaching himself the art of portraiture while he was in High-School, and shortly thereafter, people were commissioning him for portraits of friends, relatives, and pets.
While his portraits were popular, Rudansky was unsatisfied. He wasn't creating the art or conveying the creative energy he wanted to.
When asked about the transition from pencil to brush, and how he relates to what he is doing now, this is what he said:
"Everyone seemed to really like my pencil portraits, but it just wasn't doing it for me. I had to adhere to rules. I had to create a likeness. It was a very strict and unforgiving proposition. I wanted to create energy. I wanted to put something down on a canvas that would evoke a comment like "I see emotion there!", not "Wow, that really does look like so-and-so". I wanted to paint in color, to paint what I saw in my mind's eyes. But I had a problem. I was absolutely petrified of color. I didn't understand color. Color was completely unfamiliar to me. So I set out to learn about color. It took me a long time to realize this, but I discovered that a great painting is not necessarily a result of understanding color or of understanding technique, but rather a great painting is a result of letting go. Walking over to your palette or your collection of paint jars and letting your intuition . . . your feelings choose the color for you. When the color is chosen from somewhere within, then you know you've chosen the right color. Once I understood that, color wasn't scary anymore. It didn't matter if I was painting with complementary colors or not; It mattered if my paintings were true to myself. And if the painting came out and people didn't like it, so be it. Anything else would have been dishonest.
In terms of subject, I like to explore anything that involves movement and emotion. Music, dance, memories, and how they all relate and interact amongst the constantly evolving contours of human nature. I try to leave a good amount of subjectivity in each painting, to allow room for each individual to find something meaningful and deeply personal within it. My art is not completely abstract, there is form and structure, but there is also ambiguity, a certain unclarity that allows the painting to become something unique for each viewer."
Rudansky has said that the two artists he draws the most inspiration from are Jackson Pollack and Willem De Kooning.
He was born and raised in Huntington, LI, and now lives on the South Shore with his wife.
