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Alumni Notes
 There's
a good chance that you've seen the artwork of Steve Buchanan
'71, if not handled it. His illustrations have been featured
in three popular series of stamps issued by the United States
Postal Service. The first, showcasing tropical plants, was a
bestseller, while his second series--insects and spiders--was
the sixth-greatest revenue generator in postal history. His
newest stamps pay tribute to carnivorous plants.
Buchanan, who didn't discover his talent until the
age of 40, is among a few select artists who are commissioned repeatedly
by the postal service. Trained as a classical pianist at the Conservatory,
he finished graduate studies at the University of Texas, then joined
the music faculty at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia,
where he taught for 11 years. "Art really wasn't on my radar
screen," he says. But in 1983 he married Rita Shuster '71,
a naturalist and gardening writer, who gave him a book titled Drawing
on the Right Side of the Brain, which suggests that artistically
inclined people who believe they cannot draw need simply to understand
how images are coaxed from the mind. Intrigued, Buchanan diligently
completed the exercises at the end of each chapter. "By the
time I got to the end of the book, I could draw things. I was really
astonished," he says.
Inspired, Buchanan enrolled in art classes at James
Madison. In 1987 he quit his job. He and Rita moved to Connecticut,
where he continued his coursework at the University of Hartford's
School of Art, specializing in botanical illustration. One of his
first professional assignments was to illustrate a Scientific
American article on water hyacinths. He went on to collaborate
with his wife on magazine inserts, botanical directories, and gardening
books.
Through a "completely bizarre" chain
of occurrences, Buchanan's work was recommended to the postal
service, which added him to its list of botanical artists. Today,
he has a studio above his garage, where he creates his illustrations
on the computer via a stylus and digitalized pad. His fourth
series of stamps, devoted to reptiles and amphibians, will be
released next October.
-Courtney Mauk '03
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