Photo by W.L. Bill Allen/NJSA From left, Steve Moran and his apprentice Rich Cuebas work out of their Lyndhurst headquarters at 218 Stuyvesant Ave. Cuebas’ car was an airbrush project Moran undertook recently.

Illustration, Steve Moran

By John Soltes
Editor-in-Chief

LYNDHURST (Sept. 18, 2008) — Steve Moran is a rare breed in today’s world of business blue attire and occupational conventionalism. He doesn’t schlep to his 9-to-5 job, briefcase and coffee cup in hand, sad face across his mug. He doesn’t gossip around the water cooler or answer to a boss behind an imposing mahogany desk.

No, Moran is different.

As a modern-day artist, Moran finds inspiration from the world around him and creates the impossible with the full range of the color spectrum. His instrument is the airbrush; his digs are at 218 Stuyvesant Ave. in Lyndhurst.

“I’ve been doing art ever since I could remember,” Moran said recently during an interview at S.M. Custom Airbrushing, his Lyndhurst headquarters.

Moran specializes in a hodgepodge of styles and genres, from fantasy and gothic to children’s fare and animal portraits. The variety of his subject matter is only trumped by the material he uses as a canvas. From motorcycles and T-shirts to leather jackets, trucker hats and muscle cars, if it exists, Moran will seemingly airbrush it.

During a recent visit to his shop, the artist was putting the final touches on a motorcycle, bedecked in skulls and symbols of toxicity, colored tangerine and orange pearl.

“This is his rear fender,” Moran said as he held up the motorcycle part. “I’ve been working on this for about three weeks. (The client) showed me a tattoo of a skull that he had on his arm, and he said, ‘Go with it.’ He gave me a couple grand and said do your thing. I love that kind of work.”

Though Moran deals in paintings of fire and brimstone (for the bikes) and stylized lettering and portraits (for the many Bar Mitzvah parties he works), his is not a fleeting profession. The paint, for Moran, runs deep.

One can find evidence of this by simply hearing Moran talk about one of his pieces of art: “So, I started doing these skulls and then I started thinking, it’s just skulls, skulls, skulls. So I put a biohazard (symbol). What’s causing all this chaos? … On the front fender, I threw in the poison symbol, which is a skull and cross bones. And on the back of the front fender, I put a gas mask with toxic gas. … I just threw a little H bomb in there, and on the other side, I might just do a ghost skull.”

Sometimes Moran wings it, eyeing his palette and letting loose with the pressurized airbrush. Other times, he sketches out a design and utilizes a piece of chalk.

In the back room of his shop, the walls are thick with paint from the many false starts and practice tests throughout the years.

Years in the making

Moran has been in business, in one form or another, for roughly 15 years. Before Lyndhurst, where he’s been located for eight years, he worked from the basement of his house.

Art has been pulsating within him for some time.

“I sold my first painting in second grade to an art gallery,” he said. “I ended up getting a long strip of paper and putting thumb prints down and making a little marching band. … It sold within two weeks; the person loved the fact that it was done by a second grader.”

Moran credits his father, a commercial artist, as having a positive influence on his impressionable mind. “He introduced me to the airbrush when I was younger,” Moran said. “He taught me a lot about art in general and business and art.”

His father also introduced him to the work of Frank Frazetta, the legendary fantasy artist.

From this inspiration, Moran began to test the waters, constantly looking to perfect his craft. “It was kind of trial and error, trial and error, until eventually I just locked myself in my studio,” he remembered “I worked in a fabric company. I got rolls of fabric, and I would just practice the drills over and over again with a pot of coffee until I got a twitch in my eye.”

Eventually, Moran mastered the form, which requires speed and technique, and now sits as a leader among airbrush artists in the local area. Some of his proudest works are displayed on the walls of his Lyndhurst headquarters: enormous portraits of a panda bear and white Siberian tiger.

One of the next big projects for Moran is revamping his own Big Dog K-9 Chopper. “Over the winter, I’m designing it to be a Celtic Viking theme,” he said. “I was so jealous doing everyone’s else motorcycle, and plus it gives me more of a rapport. It’s one thing to open up your portfolio and say, ‘This is what I did.’ It’s another thing to ride up and say, ‘Hey, this is what I did.’ ”

Visit www.smairbrushing.com for more information on Moran’s work.