Steve Scheuring

Steve Scheuring creates complex realist still lifes in which ordinary objects accumulate into dense accounts of memory, identity, and place. Toy cars, cereal boxes, regional foods, branded packaging, figurines, and domestic objects are arranged in deliberately crowded compositions, each rendered with close attention to color, temperature, texture, and reflected light.

Scheuring uses still life as a means of connection. His paintings return to family memories, unresolved feelings, moments he wants to preserve, and the people and places that have shaped him. Their abundance is visual, but also autobiographical. Every object contributes to a larger structure of association.

His attraction to drawing developed during a childhood marked by severe clubfeet. A series of operations, casts, and corrective leg braces kept Scheuring close to home during periods of recovery. He and his older brother spent hours drawing exaggerated cars and hot rods, constructing tracks for toy vehicles from books, bricks, shoeboxes, and cardboard tubes.

Popular illustration expanded that world. An uncle gave Scheuring copies of MAD magazine, whose subversive humor and distorted drawing styles held his attention until the issues fell apart. A King Kong comic introduced remote islands, dinosaurs, and giant creatures, while the fantasy art of Frank Frazetta and Boris Vallejo provided models of technical drama.

Scheuring copied these images for hours. He became so absorbed that his mother joked the house could be burning without him noticing. His parents’ enthusiastic responses to the drawings gave him a strong reason to continue, even when the source material involved monsters, violent scenes, and scantily dressed figures.

He wanted to become an artist but did not initially regard art as a practical profession. Raised in a middle-class household by a mother who worked as a bank loan officer and a father who worked as a welder, Scheuring chose advertising as a compromise between creativity and economic security.

During his senior year at Penn State, he accepted a marketing communications position with Air Products in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Before graduating, he used his remaining art credits to enroll in oil painting courses taught by Santa Barraza. Her encouragement to use the full range of colors available to him remained influential.

Oil paint immediately suited Scheuring. Its richness and flexibility allowed him to build layers, adjust color, and create gradual changes in temperature, light, and shadow. Yet after college, he put his brushes aside to concentrate on family and work. He earned an MBA, shifted from advertising into sales, relocated with his wife from Pennsylvania to Houston and back again, and did not paint for more than twelve years.

He continued to call himself an artist, but the designation eventually began to feel unearned.

In 2003, two experiences brought him back. Reconnecting with his uncle Joe, who was actively painting, forced Scheuring to confront the absence of his own practice. A business trip to Brussels and Paris then allowed him to visit the Musée d’Orsay and the Louvre for the first time. Works by Monet, Rodin, and Géricault renewed his conviction that art needed to become an active part of his life.

“I need to do this,” he remembers thinking. “I need to be an artist.”

Since then, Scheuring has kept a painting or drawing in progress at all times. Aside from his college classes, his education has been largely self-directed, built through art publications and thousands of hours at the easel.

His career outside the studio continues to influence how he works. As a sales operations executive, Scheuring teaches salespeople to listen more than they speak, question assumptions, and distinguish between what someone says and what that person means. He applies the same principles to painting.

Realism requires more time observing than applying paint. Scheuring describes the essential skill as the ability to see without filtering the subject through expectation. The eye records information, but the mind quickly substitutes general knowledge for particular fact. He must continually resist painting what he assumes an object looks like and return to what is actually present.

“Assumptions handcuff creativity,” he says.

This discipline also governs his response to periods of low motivation. Scheuring does not wait for inspiration to restore momentum. He works. Because a large painting may require hundreds of hours, he divides it into dozens of smaller problems. Each completed section provides a measurable success while contributing to the larger composition.

Ordinary experiences supply much of his subject matter. A market, a crowded street, the expression of one of his children, or the way light falls across objects in a room can initiate a painting. He is drawn to small moments that might otherwise pass without notice.

A pivotal change in his still lifes began while playing with toy cars with his young son. Scheuring had already painted portraits of his daughters and wanted to create one of the boy. During their game, his son lowered his face beside the track to watch the distorted perspective of a car moving away, repeating something Scheuring remembered doing as a child.

He retrieved a camera, hoping to capture the moment, but none of the photographs matched the image he had imagined. Then he noticed his son arranging the cars into a parking-lot grid.

A recent visit to the Museum of Modern Art had left Scheuring thinking about large compositions organized as fields and grids of color. The toy cars suggested a way to combine those abstract structures with realist technique. Jam and Gridlock emerged from that connection.

In Crash, he extended the idea by translating the apparent randomness of Jackson Pollock’s marks into a horizontal pile of toy cars. A curator later commented on Scheuring’s use of repetition and his fascination with the shape of automobiles. The observation redirected his attention toward another recurring form: the human body.

A Pile of Soldiers replaced cars with clustered toy soldiers. The painting can be read as childhood nostalgia, but the accumulated bodies also suggest the consequences of war. The tension between children playing and an inanimate mass of human figures prevents the work from settling into a single emotional register.

Scheuring values this openness. The viewer may encounter a familiar toy, a formal exercise in shape and color, or a darker image of organized violence. The painting does not require one interpretation to eliminate the others.

His son later became the subject of Serial. When a television report prompted the child to ask what a serial killer was, Scheuring initially struggled to explain. The boy then revealed that he had associated the phrase with breakfast cereal.

The exchange led Scheuring to construct a portrait surrounded by cereal packaging, objects, and mascots. Tigers, pirates, vampires, ghosts, aliens, and monsters transformed the cheerful language of breakfast advertising into a comic but unsettling meditation on lost innocence.

Years later, after watching his son grow into an adult, Scheuring returned to the subject in Serial Revisited. The newer painting incorporates a larger and more aggressive collection of cereal mascots, reflecting what he describes as the greater complexity and intensity of the present.

Food has since become a major subject. Scheuring views cuisine as an immediate expression of culture, memory, and regional identity. His Tastes of Home series includes more than thirty paintings devoted to local foods and brands.

The central painting, also titled Tastes of Home, assembles items recognizable to people from Reading, Pennsylvania, and the surrounding Mid-Atlantic and Pennsylvania Dutch regions. Tastykake, Yuengling beer, A-Treat soda, Taylor Pork Roll, Lebanon bologna, pretzels, cheesesteaks, scrapple, dried corn, fastnachts, and other foods create an image of culinary inheritance shaped by both family experience and consumer culture.

The painting received first place in the still life category of the Portrait Society’s 2025 Members Only Competition and entered the permanent collection of the Reading Public Museum.

Related works including Berks County, New York Deli, Day After Christmas, and Philly Special extend the same investigation. Philly Special, Scheuring’s most recent painting, brings together music, food, art, people, and history in a large celebration of Philadelphia. He hopes viewers familiar with the city will recognize specific references while becoming absorbed in the density of the composition.

Scheuring organizes this abundance carefully. His large still lifes are intentionally chaotic, taking cues from the sensory excess of seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Objects move through swirling arrangements, while simpler forms such as colored plates or figurines interrupt areas of concentrated detail.

Contrast determines spatial emphasis. Objects intended to advance contain strong transitions between light and dark or colors positioned opposite one another on the color wheel. Receding forms use lower contrast, cooler temperatures, and more closely related hues. Repeated colors and shapes unify the composition across its crowded field.

Scheuring thinks of modeling form as “sculpting with temperature.” Rather than relying only upon white for highlights and black for shadows, he uses warm color to bring a surface forward and cool color to send it back. In a green olive, for example, orange may activate the highlight while blue deepens the shadow.

His priorities have changed over time. Drawing accuracy, value, and placement remain important, but edges and color temperature now receive greater attention. These subtler decisions determine whether an object appears embedded within the painting or projects convincingly from its surface.

The preparation of the canvas begins with pigment collected from the bottom of his turpentine jar. Scheuring uses this residue as an initial layer, reducing disposal while establishing a colored ground that contributes luminosity to subsequent paint. Complex compositions are often gridded to maintain perspective and object placement.

His full-time career means most painting occurs late at night or on weekends. Still life accommodates that schedule. Small objects can remain arranged beneath controlled studio lighting, allowing him to paint from life during the early morning hours. The slow drying time of oil also permits him to leave a work for several days and return while the paint remains usable.

Frequent professional travel has generated a parallel drawing practice. Scheuring carries colored pencils and creates portraits from photographs of people encountered during his trips. Much of his Parade Series has been produced in hotel rooms at night.

His influences range from the fantasy work of Frazetta to Salvador Dalí, Chuck Close, and Gary Erbe. From Dalí, Scheuring absorbed the possibilities of dream imagery, altered perspective, collage, and forms capable of being read in multiple ways. Close’s practice sharpened his understanding of grids and color mixture.

A professional comparison between Scheuring’s paintings and those of trompe l’oeil artist Gary Erbe prompted him to make contact. Their subsequent friendship has given Scheuring a close view of Erbe’s precision, narrative composition, and attention to details such as stitching, laces, and material surfaces.

Scheuring’s own work does not pursue illusion for its own sake. Technical realism allows him to make familiar objects compelling enough to sustain extended attention. Once drawn inward, viewers encounter stories about childhood, regional identity, abundance, consumerism, innocence, and the persistence of memory.

He consciously favors work that is positive, humorous, and accessible during a period he sees as socially exhausting. This choice is not an avoidance of complexity. Paintings such as A Pile of Soldiers and Serial demonstrate how nostalgia can coexist with unease. Joy and darker interpretation remain available within the same image.

Scheuring is an elected member of several professional art organizations and serves on the Board of Directors of Allied Artists of America. His paintings have received numerous awards and appeared in exhibitions and publications, but the underlying standard remains the commitment he made in 2003: always keep a work in progress.

The discipline learned in business and the attention demanded by realism continue to reinforce one another. Listen more. Assume less. Look again. Then begin the next section.

For Scheuring, being an artist is not sustained by identification alone. It is established repeatedly through the physical act of making.