About The artist...

     It all started over a long, lonely weekend of call at the hospital and, what began as a way to decompress from the ardors of hospital care, grew into a driving passion to create fine art using the iPad as the canvas. 

    Dr. John Zubro is an advanced practice clinician in the discipline of neurosurgery who had long nursed artistic aspirations. However, after growing weary of the mess and tedium of traditional art media (i.e. oils, acrylics, etc) he had abandoned such pursuits, much to his chagrin. Nevertheless, the pressures of treating hospitalized patients was beginning to take a toll, made little better by spending hundreds of hours a month in a windowless 'on-call' room (essentially a tiny hotel room) at the hospital waiting for the next emergency. Still, there seemed no solution was possible until, in 2015, the Apple Pencil was introduced and it at last became possible to create fine art with the iPad as the canvas...

    Inspiration for artistic expression is drawn largely from the works of Gustave Doré, the great sculptor, painter and illustrator of the late 1850s. Doré is best known for his prolific production of many hundreds of wood-cuts that have adorned the pages of many of the great literary works of all time, not the least of which was the Old and New Testaments of the Holy Bible. Doré’s engravings were used to produce the images for print and in this way have outlived him for nearly 150 years. Other well known works that were illustrated by Doré include Dante’s Inferno and Cervantes’ Don Quixote. 

     Following several years of experimenting with the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, Dr. Zubro has developed a technique that, while reminiscent of Doré, varies in one very important respect. Instead of carving wood to create a relief, he applies white lines to a black iPad canvas that then creates a virtual relief. This process often begins with thematic inspiration drawn from lucid dreams he experiences that are further developed to produces high-contrast sketches. These rough illustrations are then used to guide the application of the white lines to the iPad canvas. Many of the works contain literally thousands of individually hand-applied lines, and often take many dozens of hours to complete over months of time. 

     The artist primary purpose is to channel the pressures of his health care work into a constructive and creative processes but sincerely hopes that others may also find a beneficial diversion in his art.