In my new Fly-By and Drive-By editions for The Lapis Press, I revealed structures in photographs, bringing out the essence within those images of daily life that intrigue me using various techniques.
In the Fly-Bys, I painted each bubble with acrylic paint to change and sharpen the focus.
In the Drive-Bys, I used a sgraffito technique and powdered pigment, along with painting on the surface of each photograph, highlighting key visual elements. Each image in both editions is an original, turning the notion of editions upside down.
Overall, my work plays with opposites: hard becomes soft, opacity becomes transparency, in focus becomes out of focus, flatness becomes dimensionality, and what seems matter-of-fact slides into ambiguity. My work is best when looked at slowly, and, hopefully, it will echo back to you.
- Steven Steinman
When you first lay eyes on one of the drawn, painted, or photographed works by Steven Steinman you are not immediately certain what you are looking at. The surface resembles a Wirrwarr of intersecting lines and patterns that are parting in various directions. But slowly the eye settles on one detail and the composition itself unfolds.
Although most of Steinman’s pieces seem abstract, they reveal scenes or instants of our daily life that go by too often without noticing: a crack on a wall, the grey asphalt on the street that people walk or drive over without giving it much thought, electric power lines, the shadow that rescinds with the bright sunlight.
At the core of Steinman’s artistic practice lies a sense of curiosity that is equally a trait of his personality. His vivid observation reveals a capacity to wonder and marvel at the world, a capacity that many of us loose as we get absorbed by the everyday routine. It reverberates in his work through a quasi-obsessiveness in capturing what surrounds us. This is what fuels Steinman’s practice and gives him not only infinite source material but also a constant challenge to reveal the concealed parts to others through his compositions.
In Fly-Bys and Drive-Bys, two new sets of unique hand-painted prints published by Lapis Press in 2025, the same attention is given to the mundane as the works illustrate a moment captured and taken out of the forgotten to be impressed on paper. Both bodies of prints exemplify how Steinman’s photographic practice deeply informs his paintings and drawings.Going back to images that he photographed years ago, he connects the past with the present, creating images that exist out of time. Steinman calls them “photographic notes to […] use in the future either to integrate into drawings or paintings, or as photographs themselves.[1]”
A picture taken in the moment, then forgotten and only rediscovered years later, was the origin of the Fly-Bys print series. The works are based on condensation photos taken during a trip from Los Angeles to New York City in 2012. Steinman captured drops outside the plane window with his phone, intrigued by the strange beauty of the encounter between water and light. The liquid beads outside the windows reflect the sunlight, revealing a prism of colors. Enlarging the image gave place to further experiments with the pixelized surface, triggering a painterly manipulation. Steinman enhanced the apparent colors and contours by painting on each of the many bubbles, highlighting the effects of light and shadow. Through this process he turned the transparency of the liquid into something that is both material and immaterial, making perceptible something that is at the periphery of vision.
The different editions of Drive-Bys demonstrate Steinman’s fascination with urban life that has informed various bodies of work. The physical and emotional experience of cities such as Los Angeles, New York, Berlin, all metropoles that he lived in, has led Steinman to look for traces beyond or beneath the obvious. He has turned to frottage in past works, rubbing drawing material over paper or fabric to reveal the structure underneath.
Here, the asphalt of the streets in Los Angeles caught his attention. He created unique prints
“with scratches in the surface of the paper, silver/white powdered pigment on the crosswalks and black acrylic ink painted individually on all of the tar marks from the cuts in the street for the wires [and] the black ink is raised up on the paper as if there were actually tar on there.[2]”
These prints illustrate how his camera captures fleeting, transitory moments of daily life, such as crossing a street or being on a plane. Each piece tells a story and embodies memories of places and people, revealing hidden patterns made visible through the juxtaposition of light and shadow. And despite their abstract character, the title of each set of prints gives us a lead, as Steinman cheekily draws our attention to the action that is implied in the work: we fly by, we drive by….
Frauke V. Josenhans
Curator at the Moody Center for the Arts, Houston, Texas