A former Cranberry Township resident is proving an artist can live his dream.

Rick Bach, a 1979 Seneca Valley Senior High School graduate, is a full-time painter and sculptor whose creations appear in Mad Mex restaurants all over the Pittsburgh area. Bach recently signed a 10-year contract with Mad Mex to provide the art for an ever-increasing number of restaurants.

Bach's interest in art began when his parents, Richard and Barbara Bach, handed him his first coloring book.

“They said I opened it and drew on the inside cover,” Bach said.

His interest in art continued, particularly when it came to drawing horses.

“I obsessively drew horses when I was a kid,” Bach recalled of his carefree childhood with his five brothers and sisters on Marshall Road in then-rural Cranberry Township. “I had about 100 horse statues I used as models.”

In second grade, Bach began airbrushing his model cars at Bach's Auto Body and Painting, his father's auto body shop, where the elder Bach built and painted muscle cars and motorcycles.

“All the other kids would ask me to paint their (model cars),” Bach said.

As he grew, Bach helped his father with airbrush jobs.

“In 10th grade, my dad gave me all his difficult airbrush work,” Bach said.

Bach served as his father's custom painter, airbrushing ethereal scenes, rock album covers and whatever else customers requested on their cars, vans or motorcycles.

“I was doing all my dad's airbrush work in 10th and 11th grade,” Bach said.

Richard Bach of Cranberry Township said his son has always been precocious, having demonstrated the communication skills of a 3-year-old at age 1.

Given his advanced abilities, Richard Bach began teaching his infant son art at 13 months. By kindergarten, he could draw virtually any animal very clearly and was asked by his kindergarten teacher at Rowan Elementary to draw huge animals on the blackboards of other classrooms.

“All he wanted to do was draw,” Richard Bach said.

He said that passion for art continues today, as Rick leaves his parents an illustrated note every morning when he leaves their house to work for Mad Mex or another Pittsburgh-area project.

Richard Bach said if his son attends a wedding reception where white paper covers the tables, he will go around the room and draw caricatures of the families at the tables.

“People rip them off and take them home,” he said. “To this day, don't leave a blank piece of paper in front of him. He can't help it; he has to draw on it,”

He credits his son's work welding and painting in his body shop with his ability to create steel sculptures today.

Bach said his son's work can be seen in Mount Oliver, at the trendy club Bosanova on 7th Street in downtown Pittsburgh, and as far away as Ohio or the Ocean City, Md., boardwalk.

“We are very proud of him,” Bach said. “He has surpassed me by 2,000 times in art ability.”

But not everyone was as impressed with the obviously talented young man.

At Seneca Valley, Rick Bach's skill was not enough to get him into the junior high art club, where he longed to get his hands on the plethora of art supplies it provided.

“They wouldn't let me in,” Bach said. “They said 'You're too arrogant. You don't get along with the other kids in the art room.'”

Having learned a few lessons, the opposite was true by the time he reached senior high. There, he painted a mural in a 60-foot hallway near the auditorium. He painted the stream-of-consciousness cartoons of “hippies and hot cars and flying dogs” on four-by-four foot sheets of paper, which he then secured to the wall to create the long mural. He would invite classmates to stay after school and help him color in the mural.

“It was a way to meet girls,” Bach said. “I worked on the mural for a year during study halls. I had scaffolding set up. They let me have the run of the place.”

A few years later, an astute principal noticed the mural contained questionable leaves and other items germane to the late 1970s, which the principal deemed inappropriate.

“They painted over it,” Bach said, chuckling at the 25-year-old memory.

Making good money at the body shop, Bach decided to fly to Los Angeles to check out the California Institute of the Arts, where all the Disney artists had honed their craft.

“They make millions of little drawings all day,” Bach said. “It wasn't for me.”

Back home, he continued his airbrush career, driving his Porsche and competing in motocross racing.

After spending a few years sowing wild oats in Oklahoma, he returned in 1985 to enroll in the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. He said the experience gave him a new perspective.

“It gave me a few years with nothing to do but art,” Bach said. “I also looked at art seriously, something beside airbrushing vans.”

After graduation, he formed an ad design studio that garnered several awards for his creations.

“But then computers came along, and I wasn't interested,” Bach said of the new means of ad design.

He dissolved his studio and began building metal furniture for bars and other businesses.

“I had come full circle; I was back into steel,” Bach said.

He also owned a fine arts gallery, “Occupant,” on Pittsburgh's South Side, where he pursued interior design.

His interest in steel as a medium earned him thousands of dollars when he began painting on steel and selling his work at Pittsburgh art shows.

“It was ridiculously successful,” Bach said.

Bach took the money and went on a whirlwind extended trip to New York City and Amsterdam in The Netherlands.

“I came back to Pittsburgh completely broke,” Bach said.

A series of one-man art shows in 1997 attracted the attention of Mad Mex, which is based in Pittsburgh. The restaurant company bought 20 of his steel paintings for a new restaurant in Philadelphia.

When the company's main artist left, Bach was hired to provide art for Mad Mex. Two years ago, he signed a 10-year contract with the company.

Bach works feverishly for months when Mad Mex plans to open a new restaurant, then he takes a few months off with his girlfriend in Washington, D.C. He lives with her in the capital when he's not working in his Wilkinsburg studio, Technique Architectural Products.

Bach's latest process uses gun powder to burn images onto tables used at Mad Mex.

He places the powder on the tabletop in the form of an image, then lights it.

“It explodes and makes a cool image on the wood,” Bach said. “I've done several hundred tables for Mad Mex.”

Several of Bach's steel paintings and sculptures adorn the walls of the Mad Mex on Route 19 in Cranberry Township.

His latest undertaking is the resurfacing of a 20-foot-tall horse sculpture he made in 2004 and placed outside of the Mad Mex on McKnight Road in Ross Township.

Years of changing seasons and weather rendered the horse rusty, so Bach last week repainted the horse black. He then added red and white swirls to catch the eye of Mad Mex patrons.

He is also building steel sculptures of steelworkers for a bar his friend plans to open this fall in Homestead, Allegheny County. The bar will be called Dorothy 6, and will feature a logo designed by Bach, as well as paintings and the sculptures.

Looking back, Bach is pleased with the choices he has made and the ground he has gained.

“It's been a hell of a ride,” he said.