Our Story

Let’s start with Steve

I was born in 1970 in Toledo, Ohio. My childhood was defined by freedom—long hours in the woods, curiosity encouraged, and the understanding that exploration was a virtue. My parents enrolled me in art classes at the Toledo Museum of Art when I was five. I remember the feeling of making things, of shaping something from nothing.

But what shaped me most in those early years wasn’t an art studio—it was discipline and experimentation. Martial arts, fencing, archery, golf, bicycling—everything was on the table. I was encouraged to test myself, to try, to fail, to refine. That mindset would later become foundational to both my military service and my artistic practice.

Corporal Schaub somewhere in the UAE during the Gulf War.

The Marine Corps: Discipline, Science, and Responsibility

After high school, uncertain of my path, I made a decision that would define me. Perhaps I had watched Heartbreak Ridge one too many times, but I enlisted in the United States Marine Corps on an open contract.

I tested well and was assigned MOS 5711: Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Defense Specialist. It was a highly technical and demanding field, and I thrived in the science, the rigor, the responsibility. I was promoted to Corporal (E-4) at an early stage in my service and eventually became the NBC NCO for 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines.

During Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm, I deployed to the Persian Gulf as part of the Fourth Marine Expeditionary Brigade, one of the largest amphibious operations since the Korean War. I trained Marines in chemical warfare survival and was awarded the Navy Achievement Medal for my actions. The medal was presented to me by Colonel James Conway—who would later become the 34th Commandant of the Marine Corps, as well as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

I vividly remember sitting on the deck of the USS Raleigh (LPD-1), watching the USS Wisconsin and USS Missouri fire their massive guns while Harriers roared overhead. It was in that moment—amid the machinery of war—that I made the most peaceful decision of my life:

I would become an artist.

Rochester Institute of Technology: Craft Meets Vision, Steve Meets Eve

After returning from the Gulf, I transitioned back to civilian life—an adjustment that, in hindsight, was harder than I realized at the time. I spent a year in community college and worked in a one-hour photo lab, reacclimating to civilian rhythms.

I was accepted into the commercial photography program at the Rochester Institute of Technology through an accelerated summer transfer program—completing the equivalent of a first year in three months. I chose commercial photography because I wanted technical mastery: lighting, process, precision. The discipline I learned in the Marines translated directly into my approach to craft. Fine art, I knew, could evolve alongside technical fluency.

It was during my final year at RIT that I met Eve.

She was in the graduate program; I was an undergraduate. Our paths had never crossed, until a five-week photography trip through the American Southwest changed that- and everything. Seventeen of us traveled through desert landscapes, photographing, camping, living inside the act of image-making.

On the drive home, I needed a ride, and Eve had a car.

That ride home became a life together.

The Camera That Changed Everything

My introduction to photography had happened shortly before deployment. One Friday afternoon, I bought an inexpensive camera. By Monday morning, I knew photography would be my life’s work.

This was pre-internet. Learning would mean a lot of trial, error, and wasted film. It meant books I barely understood. It meant befriending military photographers who let me observe the darkroom, slowly revealing a much larger creative world. I took out a bank loan I couldn’t afford and purchased a professional Nikon system I didn’t yet know how to use.

It was reckless, impractical, and absolutely right.

Yes, I still have that Olympus XA camera!

Vermont: Choosing the Harder, Better Path

After Rochester, Eve and I made another decision that, like joining the Marines or buying that first Nikon system, made no practical sense on paper.

We moved to Vermont. Not New York. Not Los Angeles. Not a city with galleries on every corner and built-in foot traffic.

Vermont.

What we were choosing was space — physical space, creative space, psychological space. We wanted room to build something that felt honest. We wanted seasons, land. We wanted the kind of quiet where ideas can grow strong or disappear.

The move was not romantic in the way Instagram imagines these things. It was hard.

There is no built-in art market in rural Vermont. No steady collector stream walking through the studio door. No safety net. We were building not just a body of work, but an entire ecosystem: exhibitions, publishing, installations, relationships, shipping logistics, teaching, licensing — everything required to make an artistic life self-sustaining. And we were doing it together.

What my Marine Corps training gave me was resilience. What RIT gave me was technical confidence. What Vermont demanded was long-game endurance.

There have been winters where sales were thin. There were moments where we questioned whether this was practical. There were long nights printing, building, experimenting, failing, revising. But Vermont gave us something even more valuable than a market: it gave us identity.

The landscape, the hayfields, the old houses, the history embedded in New England soil — these became collaborators. The scale of the sky changed our scale of thinking. The quiet sharpened our voice. The isolation forced innovation.

Rather than “fit” into an existing art world model, we built our own.

Vermont didn’t make it easier. It made it clearer. And clarity is more powerful than convenience.

Our first time in Vermont. Top picture is our first picnic at White Rocks while the second is us out for a nice dinner on the same trip… we were so young!

Eve + Steve → EveNSteve

For two decades, Eve and I created side by side — but separately.

I built a career as a commercial and architectural photographer, master darkroom printer, and educator. I exhibited work in galleries from Vermont to the Hamptons to Singapore. My practice evolved slowly away from strict commercial precision and toward something more atmospheric — less about documenting what is and more about suggesting what lingers.

Eve was building something equally powerful in a different medium.

With a dual degree from Cornell University and a master’s degree from the Rochester Institute of Technology, she carved out a writing career defined by bold, immersive ideas. Her books — Year of No Sugar, Year of No Clutter, and Year of No Garbage — were memoirs chronicling lived commitments. When Eve decides to explore something, she commits fully, often for years. That discipline — that willingness to see an idea through long after it stops being convenient — is one of the qualities I admire most in her.

While she was freelance writing, authoring books and raising our two daughters with extraordinary focus and presence, I was steadily refining my own visual language.

We were collaborators long before we named it: I photographed her author portraits. She wrote introductions for my exhibitions and artist statements. We edited each other’s ideas. We debated philosophy around the coffee table.

The lines where her practice ended and mine began were always blurred.

Documentary of Steve’s artwork and process by Studio Skylight for CineStill Film right as EveNSteve was taking shape, in the video you get to see some of the very first EveNSteve artworks in process.

The Pivot: 2019

In 2019, after over twenty years of marriage, shared critique, and parallel creative paths, we made another bold decision:

We formed EveNSteve.

It wasn’t a branding exercise. It was a natural progression and felt like an artistic inevitability.

Our collaborative work merges my photography — increasingly concerned with presence, atmosphere, and the recording of memory rather than simple representation — with Eve’s hand-inscribed text, narrative fragments, historical research, and mythological inquiry.

We began asking different kinds of questions: What stories do we inherit? Which myths shape our identities? How much of history is memory — and how much is invention? What happens when text and image refuse to behave politely?

The work became larger, more physical and more layered.

The past seven years have become the most rewarding creative years of my life. Large-scale installations in hayfields. Mixed-media photographic works incorporating text, fragments, and handmade materials. Projects that blur the line between commercial precision and fine art vulnerability. A practice rooted equally in discipline and risk.

I no longer make artwork outside of our collaboration. Not because I can’t — but because I don’t want to.

What we build together carries more weight than anything I could construct alone. It contains her discipline and my restlessness. Her patience and my urgency. Her instinct for long-form narrative and mine for atmosphere.

We don’t think of EveNSteve as a merger of two careers. It is a third entity — something neither of us could have become independently.

And at its core is the same thing that started everything: A desire to tell stories.

EveNSteve in their Vermont Studio working on artworks from Tales of the Bittersweet. (2026)