Steven Robert Kozar was born in 1964 in Illinois, where he lived until moving to Wisconsin in 1986. He grew up in Lake Zurich, IL, a (then) small town approximately 35 miles northwest of Chicago. His parents moved to Lake Zurich from Chicago right before he was born. Although he lived on the edge of farm country, he had no history of rural or agricultural living in his family.
“One of my favorite childhood memories is feeding grass to the cows that lived on the farm down the street. We had a large field (with a nearby creek) across the street and a wooded area behind us.”
For as long as he remembers, he was always busy drawing. His interest in architecture and Frank Lloyd Wright caused him to draw detailed images from the books he repeatedly checked out of the local library. The modern American sculptor/artist Alexander Calder was also a big favorite. Kozar spent hours in the basement with a blowtorch making mobiles (hanging sculptures) out of thin sheet metal and wire.
“I felt driven to create things. A perfect day for me would have been to be left alone with a gigantic pile of junk so I could make something out of it.”
Around the same time (fifth or sixth grade) he became familiar with the painting of Andrew Wyeth. As a youngster, Kozar enjoyed staring out the car window at the repeating rows of corn in the surrounding countryside, and he was especially fond of the rolling farmland in nearby Wisconsin. Seeing Wyeth’s work instilled a deeper love of the rural landscape in him, as well as an interest in watercolor. A high school art teacher prompted him to copy a Wyeth painting in watercolor, and within a few hours he painted an amazing duplicate. His relationship to watercolor was cemented on that day.
“My art teacher, Bill Weber, told me that I could make a living as an artist/illustrator when he saw what I did. I remember being very excited about it.”
In high school, Kozar experienced his parents’ divorce at an already difficult time in his young life. After having just begun getting into trouble with the wrong crowd he was invited to a “Campus Life” club in his town- a non-denominational ministry of Youth for Christ. Along with providing a deep and lasting spiritual foundation for him, the group spent extensive time camping, rock climbing, canoeing, and bicycling in Wisconsin. Kozar's love of the rolling farmland of Wisconsin was permanently cemented at that time.
“I’m thankful that my best teenage memories involve time spent in the beauty and quietude of the outdoors, talking and thinking about the really important matters of life.”
Kozar was also becoming permanently cemented to Paulette during that same time. They knew each other since kindergarten and began dating at age fourteen. While the teenage Kozar tried to decide what to do with his life, Paulette was already dreaming of marrying him and helping him to become a great artist.
As a somewhat anti-establishment teenager, Kozar was bored with much of high school and had marginal interest in college. After high school he began work as a construction worker taking apart old barns. After a year and a half of low-paying physical labor, he was given the task of making a pencil drawing of the barn framework as a guide to re-build the structure elsewhere. Sitting in a field drawing while his workmates swung sledgehammers gave Kozar a very profound thought;
“I should be using my God-given talent for art instead of wasting my life doing construction work!”
He enrolled at Illinois State University for the simple reason that some friends went there. He enjoyed studying European History and Art History (as well as Music Theory) but was dissatisfied with the lack of disciplined training going on at the time. Ironically, as an underclassman he never met or studied with Harold Gregor at I.S.U. Gregor is considered the “dean “ of Midwestern realism landscape painters, and today Kozar and he exhibit together on occasion.
“My time at the University was helpful because I gained a broader perspective on art and its place in history. It was also a difficult time because what I was interested in-drawing and painting realistically-was looked down upon by many of my teachers.”
Kozar left I.S.U. after only a year and a half to attend classes at the American Academy of Art in Chicago. The Academy was a small private art school still teaching some of the old principles of drawing and painting that had been discarded by much of academia. When Kozar saw examples of student work, he knew he’d found a place that could teach him what he really wanted to learn-how to draw and paint.
“We didn’t look at pictures of art in books-we did it. All day long, five days a week, all we did was draw and paint. I was like a starving man who just stepped into an all-you-can-eat buffet!”
Because Kozar was always the best in whatever art class he took, he never felt very challenged in school-until he found himself in Life-Drawing 101 at the American Academy of Art. Two things caused him to accelerate and grow his skills very quickly at the art school; one, he saw students that could draw and paint better than him, which brought out a more competitive side to his usually laid-back personality. And two, he was a twenty-one year old newlywed trying to “get good” in a hurry so he could support a wife and, eventually, a family.
Living in a tiny studio apartment in downtown Chicago, Kozar vowed to Paulette that he’d be a nationally known artist in five years. In the isolation of that cramped apartment, he worked constantly at improving his skills. When not in class he was visiting the Art Institute of Chicago, or reading about art and artists at the Chicago Public Library. Even at an art school full of art students his classmates would say “is that all you talk about-art?!”
Living in the city invigorated him, and surrounding himself with art on a daily basis reinforced the idea that he could become a professional artist. It’s interesting to note that some of today’s best artists were also attending the academy at that time.
“I was in class with Nancy Guzik, Rose Frantzen, Joe Lorusso, Tim Liess, and others, all in that short period of a year and a half. Right before I started Dan Gerhartz finished, and as I was leaving Scott Burdick was getting started. I regret that I didn’t maintain more relationships from that time, but I’m honored to have been among such a strong group of artists.”
At the American Academy of Art, Kozar changed from un-focused to laser-focused. His determination was partly the result of the sound disciplined training he received; but it was also a reaction against the instructors that seemed to promote a narrow view of what a watercolor (or oil) painting should look like.
“Looking back, I was very stubborn about what I considered good painting. Unfortunately, I left school with a chip on my shoulder. The school leaned heavily towards a looser, more “expressive” style of painting but I was only interested in a more photo-realistic style of painting. My anger propelled me to paint like crazy, although that wasn’t my main motivation. I basically wanted to be left alone so I could go out and make the paintings I envisioned in my head. Within a couple of years I was able to look back at the work I’d produced and realize that I’d done it.”
Kozar decided to make the jump into full time painting at the age of twenty-two. He’d heard story after story of commercial artists working for twenty or thirty years and then finally going into fine art painting-doing what they really wanted to do.
“Paulette and I decided to skip the twenty or thirty year part. We had an art show at my Mom’s house where I had a bunch of drawings and paintings for sale-it was work I produced during the previous year at the art school. We literally prayed for money to move out of the city and for a car. God answered quite directly: we were at church when a stranger approached us and asked if we’d like to buy his car for a dollar. Then, in the afternoon, we made over two thousand dollars at the little art show at my Mom’s. We took it as a sign.”
Kozar eventually moved to rural Wisconsin where he immersed himself in the landscape. He’s taken many thousands of slides and continues to spend time looking for new things to paint.
“One of my favorite things is being outdoors, exploring the countryside and looking for new compositions. I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of the beauty I see.”
