Home

When you get your radiation treatments they put a custom made mask on you and bolt you to a table for 30–45 minutes. You can’t move and have to be very still. Most of the time is spent lining up the head and neck area with clinical precision and accuracy.
Then they “fry you” with several 30–60 second shots of “hell fire”. You don’t ever feel the radiation shots. It isn’t until your treatments two weeks in when the “after burn” starts. Your face is fried from the inside out, your energy is sapped and you’re suppose to feel like “hell”.
Creativity played a big part of getting through each of the 40 or so treatments. I would visualize myself as a strong warrior – “let” the radiation burn the cancer cells but not my soul or my hope or the need for my three boys to have a dad.
It worked. I never let my soul fall into the bath of fire that can take your spirit for life away.
This painting is a symbol of ALL my creative strength and belief of a higher spirit.

2010
Burning Resilience
Pigment Fresco/Acrylic on Board
36" x 51.5"
$6,375

“The top gets higher the more that I climb”.
Lil Wayne
The influence of the painting came from rapper Lil Wayne’s lyrics “The top gets higher the more that I climb” which is also highly symbolic of my own life’s path.
Starting at the bottom and working upwards, the bold strip of white at the bottom of the painting symbolizes “a white light” – I survived an early childhood illness where I almost died. The visual “gears of life” represent the grind WE ALL go through in life. I had to make it on my own from age 16 when I lost my mother to cancer – started a highly unstable career as an artist, “switched gears” and built a successful branding business after seven hard years of work and perseverance – only to lose that to my battle with cancer and it’s side effects for another five years.
It wasn’t until only recently that I was able to conquer the gears and reached the top of the building (defeating cancer). I realized however that I had no interest in being the “king of any castle” i.e. going back to a lucrative career in the business world (see the abandoned crown) and I took my “mask off” as I experienced a creative explosion (as symbolized by the colourful geometric shapes) that allowed me to find my true artistic identity or path: the About Face Series.
Even though the tiger has “broken through the top”, he still has a fire inside him as he aspires to even greater heights. This is symbolized by the elevated bars of achievement that he reaches for and is symbolic of the notion that “the artist is lost when he has found himself.”
Never stop looking or pushing the boundaries – the role of a true artist.

2010
Fire Inside
Pigment Fresco/Acrylic on canvas/board
41" x 71"
hold

My greatest gift was not surviving cancer – but actually the realization that to help others is to make you strong. I was given the gift of strength to be a “Warrior of Hope” This is where I found my peace.
In Leonardo’s painting of the Saint Jerome – he drew some buildings that appear far in the distance, hidden between some rocks behind the Saint. He did this to symbolize the Saint’s act of helping the wild injured lion as a spiritual gesture separated from the material world.
I did the same by representing peace as a spiritual gesture – the animal depicted in the foreground is taking the “hope warrior mask” for a ride. He is content, happy and at peace. Small bomb-like symbols appear in the distance separated from this foreground scene. They serve to underscore the walk of peace through symbolic contrast.

2010
Peace Walker
Pigment Fresco/Acrylic on Canvas
36" x 50"
$6,375

About Face: Steven Csorba - a “surgeon” of the soul and of human expression.

Our scars have the power to remind us that our past was real, and for me artistic expression became the ultimate path towards healing, redemption and hope.”

Steven Csorba’s original paintings celebrate his victory in his fight against cancer – and the things he discovered in facing the challenge. “The experience taught me something,” Csorba said. “If you never give up, you can achieve things you never thought possible – despite unbelievable hardships and impossible odds. This work – these paintings – are all about that.

It is this “dramatic patina of color and texture” Csorba creates – that becomes an enduring “patina of hope” – where he uses the creative process as a gesture or even weapon of his will to survive and endure. His new series of art “About Face”, is an approach forward that digs into Csorba’s enduring past and battle with the side effects of cancer, surgery and radiation.

His cancer diagnosis required groundbreaking reconstructive surgery to his throat and neck. “They cut right across your neck, peel your face off, crack your jaw, take part of your arm to rebuild your throat, stick a tracheotomy in there and follow up with months of radiation” – Csorba says matter-of-factly, noting how he lost almost 75 pounds, took morphine for a year and had to teach himself to speak again. All of this was the easy part as he lost yet another 5 years to the reconstruction of his jaw and new life. The rebuilding of the human spirit and soul will take a lifetime.

The artist has now become a “surgeon” of his own soul and of human expression. Each painting calls out,” I will try to fix you – but how? In a fugue of gestural restraint and release, Csorba’s masked beings and fantasy animal portraits hover in a space between anguish and a calm stillness. The result is that the viewer gets caught up in a spiritual tornado that seems to penetrate a secret or a gritty syntax of reality. There is a protracted intensity in the substance and subject of the work, a terse expression to the unending contingencies of life and change.

Within each work, whether it’s a masked face expressing joy or resilience or a tiger leaping to great heights, each figure is itself a shifting sequence or series of sensations; each sensation exists at different levels, in different orders, or in different domains, brought together in the artist's attempt to unravel the cluster of sensations that he experienced to survive the balance of his life and a search for peace.