BAILEYVILLE — For Sam Tucibat, the world around him is like a puzzle. He sees pieces everywhere he looks.

Clocks and cats. Doors and windows. Steeples reaching for the heavens and tangles of trees rooted in the ground. Kaleidoscopes of colors … they’re all pieces waiting to be assembled — but when they come together, the pictures they make aren’t what you’d expect.

Where some people simply see the everyday world, Tucibat sees new worlds every day, creating photographic artwork with a digital camera, his imagination, and a computer canvas.

His art lives in a world of composite photography with works that look unlike any world that most people could imagine. Images are twisted and turned and bent and blended, and layered on top of each other until they become almost unrecognizable. Yet, amid the myriad layers are pieces that anchor the viewer in reality while taking them on a journey into the abstract — a blend of the familiar and the fantastic in a photographic playground that he creates from his home studio in Baileyville, a community of about 200 people in the northwest Illinois region that he’s called home for all of his 70 years.

The unique compositions have earned Tucibat accolades and attention from the art community. He was the featured wall artist in July at the Coliseum Museum of Art, Antiques and Americana in Oregon, and has exhibited in the past at the Encore! Mt. Morris Old Sandstone Art Gallery.

When Tucibat displays his art at shows, he hopes to elicit some sort of emotional reaction or reflection from the people who gaze at his pieces, whether the work is a cacophony of colors arranged with random precision, or a soothing image of a distressed door fading into a country road.

What does the piece mean? That just depends on who’s looking at it.

“I think the meaning of the image appears in the relationship between the viewer and the art when they’re looking at it,” Tucibat said. “Whatever that person is feeling, whatever the art engenders in them, that’s the meaning. Whenever someone’s engaged in it – whenever I’m watching them – if someone’s standing at it for 30 seconds and looks through it, and you can tell that they’re processing it and having some kind of emotional interaction with it, that’s what I’m after.”

The result of his inspiration, which can be found at samzart.com, “is a sort of alchemical surprise that references both the ‘real’ world, and the dreamy, imagination-fueled world of the abstract,” he writes. The Driftless Area of northwest Illinois, southwest Wisconsin and northeast Iowa — full of hills, bluffs and scenic views that are the result of missing the slow march of glacial ice during the most recent ice age — is a favorite source of inspiration for Tucibat. Closer to home, the Nachusa Grasslands in Franklin Grove, White Pines State Park in Mount Morris, Jarrett Prairie Nature Preserve in Byron and the Rock River spark his creativity.

When Tucibat paints his pictures in pixels, he can spend hours in front of his computer screen making decisions — sometimes on the fly and sometimes after careful consideration — picking out what to emphasize and what to let lie in the background. But even with all that deliberation, trial and error still plays a part in the process — but with the benefit not afforded other artists: an “undo.” Unlike artists armed with paint and brushes, creating on a computer allows him to toggle between different versions, undoing and redoing his creative choices.

“It takes a lot of experimentation for each piece,” Tucibat said. “I hardly ever have a destination in mind when I start out making the image. I play and introduce a new element, and suddenly the whole canvas changes, as well as the emotion and what it’s saying. If you want to go with that, you can, and if you don’t want to go with that, you can go a different direction.”

Born in Dubuque and raised in Savanna, Tucibat enjoyed spending his early years among the Driftless Area and always enjoyed being surrounded by its unique topography. Every square mile seemed to have its own story, with nature, rustic buildings and the melting pot of migratory bird routes. He recalls being disappointed when trips with his parents would take them along flat roads surrounded by cornfields.

“That’s really at the core of the process that I find myself following,” Tucibat said. “I really have an attachment to the area, and I like to use photographs from the area as my source photographs for these creations that I make. I like to think that keeps it all unified and makes a statement about how cool this place is to make art out of it.”

Photography has been a part of Tucibat’s life for more than 50 years, and it started with the unique sights he would see when visiting his older brother Mike in the Chicago area. “I was walking around while visiting my brother, and everything looked so cool where his house was,” he said. “I thought, ‘If you put a frame around that and cropped it, that would look nice.’ I went more deeply into it and realized that I could separate stuff out from the world with a photograph, and it has a life of its own and a meaning of its own, and an emotional vibe of its own apart from its context.”

For 20 years, until his retirement in 2021, Tucibat taught photography, image editing, graphic design and journalism at Highland Community College in Freeport. The free time that he’s had since then has given him more time and opportunity to explore his work and develop new ways to be creative.

Tucibat purchased a 360-degree camera in 2023, one that captures a circular panorama that can be displayed on a flat screen, like unrolling a globe on a map. The shots result in bends and warps, and they’re often coiled into a spiral to make the canvas circular.

“You can take an image from that and do weird stuff with it,” he said. “I started that and it really picked up my production because it was a new perspective on reality that I can incorporate.”

And even after all his years in photography, his artistic journey is still taking him in new directions — including up. To keep from feeling “plateaued,” he said, Tucibat bought a small drone camera in August and is working on ways to incorporate it into his art.

“I saw a lot of wonderful drone footage in virtual reality, and I was thinking about what would be cool to try and add to all of this,” Tucibat said. “They’re usually high up and of landscapes, and I realized, ‘I could use that.’ Not necessarily for high footage, but to photograph a tree at a higher angle and see what’s actually in it, and see the whole tree. If there’s something interesting on the top of the tree, I don’t have to zoom in on it from a low angle, I can just go up to it.”

Even with all the years he’s spent exploring northern Illinois, Tucibat still finds scenes among the scenery that he hasn’t come across before, such as during one photography sojourn of the Thomson Causeway Recreation Area in Carroll County, when he saw a flock of orioles in the woods. One of the favorite trees he likes to capture is also at that park.

“I remember the day I took that picture, there were orioles all over the place,” Tucibat said. “I was shocked as I was walking through the woods. It’s the kind of thing that happens as you go out into the field to be creative. I was walking on a little path and I encountered a flock — you never see a bunch of orioles together, but there they were, seven or eight of them just flying around together. It was the strangest thing. I never saw that before.”

Tucibat’s website has his recent works and information on how to purchase copies — though making money isn’t the main focus of his photos these days, especially since retiring.

“I’m exploring new stuff, now that I have the time,” he said. “I’ve stopped being real ‘business-y’ about it because I realized I’m retired, I have a pension, I don’t need to make huge cash off of my art. That was kind of a freeing moment because I can more produce for myself and do what I like, instead of thinking, ‘Does anyone really want to buy this?’ I don’t have that question anymore. If someone offers me something, I’ll take it, but I’m really just trying to expand the art and expand the technique, and make better art.”

Tucibat transforms the spirit of his surroundings into something new through art. It reflects both his personal connection to the Driftless Area’s landscape and his desire to reinterpret it for others. He works to uncover an essence, something rooted in place yet elevated through imagination.

“The art itself I think is neat because I picture the art blooming from the ground of the area,” Tucibat said. “I can capture all of these images, bring them together, and then the piece of art emerges. It may not look like the area it came from in many cases, but in its essence, it’s made from parts of northwest Illinois and is a representation of the area that I came from and I like. There’s meaning in that for me that makes it cool.”

Go to samzart.com to view Tucibat’s works. Orders for purchase also can be arranged through the website.