Marc Dadigan staff writer

"It's awesome. I'm having a bad day and if I see one of those (dolphin license) plates driving around, it just brightens up my day."- Steve Diossy

Some might call it fate. Some might call it karma.
All Vero Beach's Steve Diossy knows is that his nimble ascension from waiter to professional artist has always been inextricably intertwined with the dolphin.
Having taken up surfing during his senior year at Vero Beach High School, the 26-year-old Steve Diossy said he frequently sees dolphins jumping straight up out of head-high wave while surfing during turbulent storms. He has always had a mystical "connection with them," he adds.
The most visible product of this connection is the "Protect Wild Dolphins" Florida license plate, which Diossy labored over for 18 grueling months to design and to perfect.
The creation of the license plate was overseen by the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute in Fort Pierce, which used the sale of the plates to fund dolphin research and dolphin rescue and rehabilitation.
Since the plates went on sale April 15, 1999, 50,000 have been sold, raising about $2 million, said Stephen McCulloch, director of the Dolphin Research Program at Harbor Branch.
"It's awesome. I'm having a bad day and if I see one of those plates driving around, it just brightens up my day," said Diossy, whose own dolphin license plate reads "MY PL8." "I'm just proud to be a part of it."
The design of the plate, which was selected from a group of other entries, features two dolphins gliding through the ocean, while another leaps out of the water in front of a blazing orange and yellow sunset.
The plate is meticulously detailed, from the shading on the dolphins' skin to the reflections of the sun shimmering on the ocean water.
It was so detailed and colorful in fact, that Steve Diossy had to break down the art work into millions of tiny squares and color, shade and manipulate each pixel individually so the manufacturer's press could produce the plate. He even went so far as to travel to Michigan to work face-to-face with the manufacturer, 3M Worldwide, for two days to ensure the printing process proceeded smoothly.
"There were a lot of complications with the designs as detailed as it was, and I was working all night until 4 or 5 in the morning after work," he said.
The discovery of Diossy by Harbor Branch was a serendipitous one, as Diossy actually met McCulloch while working at Morning Star Personalized Apparel, a Vero Beach T-shirt shop, in 1998.
McCulloch was picking up a rush-order of T-shirts for the institute when he struck up a conversation with Diossy about surfing, McCulloch said. Diossy showed McCulloch a surfboard onto which Diossy had airbrushed two dolphins, and the rest was history.
"I believe Steve did what no one else could have done," McCulloch said. "He has such a passion for his art, and he has a passion for the ocean and dolphins. It was a perfect marriage.
Both those passions have been ingrained in Diossy since he was young. The art, his family believes, is just a part of the gene pool, as Diossy "can't remember a time (he) wasn't drawing," he said. His older brother, Andy, 28, also works as a painter.
His bond with dolphins, however, developed over time and began with a holiday jaunt to a Florida tourist attraction.
While on a trip to Sea World at the age of 5, Diossy was so intrigued by the dolphins that he stretched out to touch them and ended up falling into the pool.
"My mom said all the dolphins immediately swam right to me to make sure I was OK, and then some guy grabbed me by the shirt and yanked me out of there," he said. "I remember I felt angry because I wanted to be in there with them."
As his experience with dolphins began early in life, so did his experimentation with art.
"Whenever I would paint when they were little, I would give them a little clay or some paper and pencils," said Diossy's mother, Hedy Toth, 49. "Maybe I had something of an artist in me, but it all came out in my boys."
His father also was a gifted carver, Diossy said, as Ambrus Diossy, 79, often endured his days in a Russian concentration camp in Hungary during World War II carving rings and animal sculptures out of peach pits.
A native Hungarian, Ambrus Diossy was forced into the camp after the Soviet Union began an occupation of the country after liberating Hungary from its former Nazi occupiers. He later escaped during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, a mass rebellion against Stalinism, and settled in Chicago.
His first job in the United States was washing the windows of the 100-story John Hancock Tower, but just six months later, Ambrus Diossy had opened his own auto-body shop, Toth said. In light of his success in America, Ambrus Diossy made several trips back to Hungary to help whole families escape Hungary's communist regime, often risking his life to transport the Hungarians through Yugoslavia to safety across the Yugoslavian woods.
Yet Toth remembers her husband's last trip to Hungary, which had her so terrified that she made him promise it was his last time smuggling Hungarians across the border. In 1976, Ambrus Diossy had guided a family through the woods in Yugoslavia to safety in Italy, and Ambrus Diossy was supposed to return to Yugoslavia and fly to Vienna, where Toth was waiting.
Yet Ambrus Diossy's plans were delayed, Toth said, when he had to carry an exhausted woman into Italy, when normally he would turn back when they reached the border. When he was late in arriving at Vienna, Toth feared the worst, she said.
"It was scary, we had no idea what had happened, he didn't call or anything," said Toth. "Later, we found out that some Yugoslavians had caught him on the border on the way back, but he just played like he was an American and was lost in the woods."
It was upon one of his returns to Hungary that he met Toth, and within a year, she had moved to the United States to marry him.
"He was wonderful man," she said. "He was a good businessman, too. Everything he touched turned to gold. He put 110 percent into everything."
However, Toth and Diossy divorced when Steve Diossy was 6-years-old, and Toth began working long hours as a home-health aide to support her two sons.
The passion and the work ethic of his parents is something that has been instilled into Steve Diossy, who frequently will stay at the office until midnight to toil with his own independent work.
"I've seen my mom working hard my whole life," he said. "Absolutely I learned to work hard from her. She always worked hard to give us a better life."
Even as a 13-year-old after his parents' divorce, Steve Diossy was so desperate to earn money to help his mother that he applied for a job at Publix before it was even legal for him to do so. He came back a year later at 14, got a job bagging groceries and has been working ever since.
"My mom was supporting the both of us (Diossy and his brother Andy), my dad wasn't able to support us as much as he could and it was killing me that my mom was working all the damn time," he said.
Yet tempered by his desire to help his family was his desire to be an artist.
After five years of toiling at grocery stores and different restaurants, Steve Diossy's life was once again touched by a dolphin in a critical turning point for the then-19-year-old, who was working as a waiter while attending art classes at Indian River Community College.
"I was sitting on the beach, and I was just so sick of working at the restaurant that I did a sort of meditation," he said. "I decided if I could do anything in art, I would do it."
At that moment, Steve Diossy said, he saw a dolphin jump out of the water, as though it were a sign of approval. An hour later, his art teacher recommended he try to work at Inner Rhythm Surf and Sport in Vero Beach as a surfboard artist.
"I just saw it as a sign," he said. "I just went over there and started banging on the door."
Steve Diossy showed the shop some sketches and though he had no experience using the shop's equipment, was given two weeks to learn how to paint designs with an airbrush. The shop took a chance, and he was a given a job - his "first break," he said.
Though his work at the surf shop was a major stepping stone in his career, he soon had to give up art classes, including a chance to attend Flagler College in St. Augustine, in order to care for his ailing mother, who developed a rare form of cataracts in 1992.
For Toth, her son's success, culminating in the license plate, soothes her with more than just maternal pride but with the means to shed any guilt that her illness held her son back.
"I almost cried when I was first saw the license plate," said Toth, who recovered from the cataracts after two operations. "I feel so happy that Steve has succeeded, especially when he was losing the chance to become what he wanted to be. I know it's very hard to succeed in this country without a college degree."
Steve Diossy has since parlayed the license plate and his designs with the surfboard shop into a profitable career at eCalton Internet Business Developers, where he designs Web sites, creates original characters and other graphic art and programs animation for web developers. One site where his work is especially prominent is (www.metatiki.com), an Internet entertainment and dining guide with a Polynesian-themed navigation design.
"I feel very happy at this moment where I am right now. I'm still doing a couple surfboards here and there," he said. "I think probably my real talent is being able to listen to a person's ideas and interpret that into art."
While working on (www.metatiki.com), Diossy created several characters, such as Spankey the monkey and Magellen the friendly parrot, who "guide" users to various locations within the site. Those characters have spurred a desire in Steve Diossy to make a cartoon of some sort in the future.
"It's one of my dreams, to make a cartoon," he said. "Ultimately, the object is to make money solely doing your own work, and people are wanting your work and not wanting you to do work for them."
For now, he must split time between designing for eCalton and his own work. Diossy is soft-spoken, and his voice pauses and proceeds through each syllable slowly and deliberately. His eyes slowly roam about the room and his expression seems almost glazed by a harmonious mist, perhaps distracted by the vision of another painting.
"I find my ideas everywhere from being out surfing, from other artists, from paintings I see in my dreams," he said. "I have tons of ideas, hundreds of little sketches I want to do paintings of. I don't have time to get a lot of it out, and I don't think I'll ever get everything out. But my goal is to use as much as I can."

(Color) Photo by Molly Bartels staff photographer: You may have a piece of Steve Diossys art and not know it. Diossy, an artist with no formal training, created the Protect Wild Dolphins license plate. A copy of it hangs in his apartment in Vero Beach.(Color) Photo by Molly Bartels staff photographer: In his apartment overlooking the ocean, Steve Diossy uses paint markers to draw a dragon on the top of a surfboard that was commissioned by Inner Rhythm Surf & Sport in Vero Beach. Diossy, who works as a Web site developer, creates designs for surfboards in his spare time.

UPDATE Since this article came out in October 21, 2001:
I have been freelancing since June of 2002.
My father passed away Dec 31st, 2003 after a five year battle with Alzheimer's. We all miss him terribly. He will not be forgotten.

"never give up"
-Ambrus L Diossy