[1][2] Raised in Wichita Falls, Texas, Steele was an American-born graphic artist/printmaker living in South Carolina best known for his lithography, an artistic process also known as relief printing.

His abstract color graphics are frequently suggestive of an artistic link between mid-late Japanese motifs and the modern world.

His highly recognizable, occasionally “militaristic” approach was developed over decades to its current status as a point of reference for the genre.

[citation needed] His earliest works featured landscape vistas fused with broadly martial representations, alternatively peaceful, then vaguely soldierly and even bellicose in composition.

Steele's contributions to the educational community of his hometown of Beaufort, South Carolina were the subject of a posthumous tribute in the Hilton Head Island News, February 2–8, 2017.