Stephen Bauman was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1980, and his family soon after that relocated to Miami, Florida, where he followed his older brother into the world of graffiti. His early exposure to this art — the constant presence of paints and sketchbooks in his childhood home and frequent trips to local walls and warehouses — provided the younger Bauman with a strong foundation of the basics of design and drawing.
But it was the years he spent from 2003 to 2009 studying and later teaching in Italy that enabled him to make a tremendous leap as an artist. His instructors taught him to look at the human figure, to see beauty in its proportions — to not, for example, draw the eyes and nose as distinct elements of the face, but to study the structures and anatomy of the head and to draw the “atmosphere” around the model. They taught him to see all over again.