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 Stephen Buzash is a professional artist who works in photography, acrylic paint, mixed media, and digital media.
He graduated from The College of New Jersey in May 2008 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art. He received Dean's List honors three times during his undergraduate career and also assisted a professor in Beginning Printmaking, helping the younger students with their etchings, answering their questions, and guiding them in art.
After graduation, Steve received a grant from the Princeton Area Community Foundation: "The Thomas George Emerging Artist Fund," awarded annually to a local young artist for living and travel expenses.
"Returning Good Fortune," Princeton Packet, 9/10/09, Ilene Dube
He is currently interning at the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions, which is housed in the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Steve began creating art in 1998, in the field of painting. His subjects range from portraits to figures to landscapes to illustrations to abstract design. Steve is a master of color and his paintings exude beauty, strength, and intensity.
Steve has extensive experience in teaching art to young children. At the Montgomery Center for the Arts in Skillman, NJ, he gave weekly art classes during the year and taught in the camp program during the summer.
Steve has held three solo exhibitions in the past four years. These exhibitions include jazz piano (performed by Tara), gourmet catering, and discussion about the art with audience involvement. Steve enjoys speaking with viewers about his paintings in order to convey his own thoughts and to discover their interpretations.
His paintings have appeared in several juried exhibitions. In 2000, The Washington Post called one of Steve's works "a swirling, surreal portrait in bile colors... as spooky as the best outsider art."
Steve has studied with internationally known Hungarian painter Sy Mohr. Among his influences, Steve counts Duccio, Simone Martini, Fra Angelico, David, Van Gogh, Da Vinci, Monet, Pollock, and Warhol. Some of his favorite paintings include Van Gogh's "The Sower," Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus," Simone Martini's "The Annunciation," Da Vinci's "Last Supper," Duccio's "Maesta Altarpiece," and Monet's "Footbridge" paintings after 1920.
For several years, Steve worked and volunteered at local art galleries including the Montgomery Center for the Arts and the American Hungarian Heritage Center in New Brunswick, NJ. His work for these galleries included hanging shows, preparing installments, and speaking to viewers about the art.
His career has taken him down many diverse paths including printing, landscape work, nursing, and the Army.
Steve was a collegiate soccer and track athlete and now enjoys various indoor and outdoor sports. He also appreciates poetry and history.
STEVE'S WORDS ON
...BUILDING BRIDGES
"I love to connect people, ideas, and 'opposites' -- things that exist in the same realm but on opposite poles, such as Andy Warhol and Leonardo da Vinci. They are both great artists. Warhol extracts from the realm of things that are already made, and adorns them. Da Vinci draws and paints exquisitely, representationally. I love them both and my goal is to reference both, but without really being either. What I do is connect disparate things that I love. In the field of music, for example, I love Hank Williams III, and I love Led Zeppelin. All these people are great in what they do, and that's the common ground that allows you to build a bridge."
...BEING PAINTERLY
"I like to be painterly in everything I do. You don't plan out every color, every aspect of the composition. You don't say ahead of time when it's going to be done, or even how it's going to be started. It's an in-the-moment intuition. The intuition comes in the form of an idea. For example -- I'm going to grab this tube of red, I'm going to apply it straight from the tube. Then you apply it in this fashion until you're done telling the story with that color red, and that's intuited also. Like in jazz, you step back, and you let it occur to you how you're going to respond to the story of red. It's response upon response until the overall story is done, in the form of an interesting composition."
...FORFEITING CONTROL
"I love to forfeit control because I'm not the one in control anyway. God is in control. His ideas are complete. So this artistic expression is a discovery of all the elements of a complete idea. This discovery is both before, during, and after the manifestation of this idea as communicated through me. Just because I've completed my project doesn't mean I've discovered all elements of the idea. Sometimes there are elements that fall into place a day, a month, even a couple years later, and you realize how neatly all the elements came together, how it bore fruit."
...LIFE EXPERIENCES
"I met my wife in 2003. I reached the turning point in my life lying in a hospital emergency room in 2005. I graduated with my B.F.A. in 2008, 26 years after high school.
"There's a ton of contemplation, and then you just do it. Should I do this? Should I ask my wife? What will happen if I go to the hospital? Should I go back to school? And then you just do it, you just move forward. That's the same way I feel about creating art. Though the work is spontaneous, I have always spent much time contemplating before starting a piece. I'm sure this will change with experience, because you become more patient and more confident that if you just wait, it will come."
STEVE'S RESUME
PUBLICITY (pdf)
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