Steve Waugh career as an artist began in the early 1970’s, while he was a student at Towson State College, now University. Sgeve wanted to paint like Vermeer. He had attended the Rhode Island School of Design for a time before that, during a period when Vermeer was not in favor. Between the two schools, he attained a fine arts degree without ever once taking an oil painting class, much less learning how Vermeer did it. So, when it comes to painting, He is mostly self-taught, relying heavily on a book, “The Painting Techniques of the Old Masters”. A good friend helped him hand-make a painting medium developed by Jacques Maroger and taught by Joseph Sheppard at the Maryland Institute College of Art. With some experimentation, Steve saw how Vermeer might have done it. Combining the old and the new, he became a photorealist and enjoyed a lot of early success. His very first large painting was chosen for the 1973 Corcoran Gallery regional biennial. Another was selected for an award at the 1976 Baltimore Museum of Art biennial. Steve often sold paintings through BMA’s Sales and Rental Gallery. His subjects included cars, trucks, and vintage trains. He fell in love with old photographs from the 1910s and 20s, drawn to the period’s clothes, music, and style, and based a series of paintings on them. Steve's full-time art practice came to an end at the close of the 1970s as he started working in IT, married, rehabbed an 1870s house in Lauraville, and started a family. In the 1980’s he started painting once again in the evening, mostly floral work and portraits of my growing family. It was at this time that he started painting in black and white due to my abiding infatuation with early 1900s photography. He retired during the pandemic of 2020 and began drawing and painting once again in black and white oils. The paintings for this show reflect his continuing interest in nature and early photography.
