While Stuart Disston is better known as an accomplished architect and senior partner at Austin Patterson Disston Architects, he is also a fine artist with a rich history in the craft. Raised by a family of artists, including his mother, grandmother, and aunt, Disston spent summers in Manhattan and across the Hudson, in Eastern Long Island; it was this early access to the great regional museums that sparked his own artist’s journey. “I remember well, as young as six years old, going with my mother to The Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum, the MOMA, as well as many smaller galleries like the National Watercolor Society.” Disston recalls fondly, “In junior high and high school, in the mid-to-late seventies, I would go to the city as often as possible to take in the new exhibits and stunning architecture. I had always painted, but not seriously.” Disston’s rapidly growing architectural career had kept him from practicing serious art until 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. “During the early days of lockdown, I created some studio space out of a spare room in the house. I started working on concepts relating to fragility, temporality, and the ability to endure. Think, the monarch butterfly.” He chuckles, “my early attempts at this idea… well, were not good, for lack of a better phrase.” After two years of work, fighting to find time between the building boom that occurred during the pandemic, Disston believes he’s found what he calls his “own medium or recipe that does a good job of addressing this thesis.” A thesis that is clearly illustrated through his complex painting surfaces, often incised, ripped or torn, or, in contrast, cut with surgical precision. Heat releases a flow of pigment, melded into the grey toned skin of the surface layer. The result is an array of beautiful color, worn and torn grasses, tree bark, sky and ocean, colorful confetti from a slashed surface, precisely cut fall leaves, and yes, butterflies. An ode to his beginnings as an artist, and importantly, an ode to his journey to present day.