Hello Friends, Fans, and Family,
This weekend is your last chance to bid on my box, Solitude, which illustrates the poem, Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening. The last night to bid is Saturday, March 24 from 5 pm-9 pm. So if you wanted to grab my box, here is your last chance! A perfect gift for people who love poetry, illustration and art. The link to the art gallery is
http://www.theartistsgalleryfrederick.com/. I hope to see you there since I am not scheduled to work. Happy Thursday!
Hi Friends, Family, and Followers,
I am taking a break from blogging on my Art of Schmidt site until life calms down a little. I’ve been juggling an art show deadline that’s looming and the art hasn’t been coming
together, and some health issues. I hope to get back to blogging more frequently after the art show opening, On and Off the Wall at the Artists Gallery in Frederick, MD. I will be joined by many local artists who work in a variety of media. All art will be for sale via silent auction and proceeds will help raise funds for the continuation of the gallery, which is operated exclusively by artists. For now, here are some progress photos of my box entry, Stopping by the Woods. Here is a link to the art show if you want to know more about it:
http://www.theartistsgalleryfrederick.com/march-2018-box-show.
In my next post, I hope to show you the completed project, but for now, I am still figuring out how to bring it to a successful conclusion. I was not happy with how the sides of the box turned out, so I am re-doing them from scratch in Photoshop. Next week, I hope to transfer these images to the box and paint the panels in Acrylic. Here are the Photoshop files in progress that will be displayed on the other sides of the box. The box is based on the poem, Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening, by Robert Frost. I love this poem because it is so mysterious. Is he talking about death, life, or the push and pull between responsibilities and dreaming, when he stops to admire the snowy woods, but then decides that he has other things to get back to at the end of the poem when he says he has “miles to go before I sleep”. I think the poem can be open to many interpretations and that’s what makes it interesting. Thanks for stopping by!
Hey Friends and Followers,
It’s that time again for me to get cracking on my box for the annual Box Show which will be displayed at The Artists’ Gallery in Frederick, MD during the month of March. I have been a participant in this show for many years and every time I make artwork for it, I learn something new and literally learn to think “outside the box.” My work will be featured with several other local Frederick Artists and all art will be for sale via silent auction at the gallery. For more details about the art show, click on the following link: http://www.theartistsgalleryfrederick.com/.
Here are a few examples of the boxes I worked on in previous box shows at the Artists’ Gallery in Frederick,
Md. The themes for the boxes range from The Chronicles of Narnia, Johnny Cash, Alice in Wonderland and this year I will be illustrating Robert Frost’s poem, Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening. I will post additional photos of this year’s box as soon as I start making more progress on it. I hope to have the sketches for the box transferred to it by this weekend so I can start painting the box with acrylic paint. Thanks for stopping by!
It’s been several weeks since I have blogged, and the reasons are many. Some new responsibilities as my mom’s caregiver, due to her shoulder replacement surgery in October, lots of hours at work, and a new custom order, among other things. Also, I keep trying to think of the perfect topic that will be entertaining to my audience and informative. And yet, when I do that I feel like I am not being my genuine self, and that leads to more inertia. So instead, I decided to share my artist statement for my new poetry illustration series, Voices, and Visions. So here it is.
Voices and Visions
How does an idea for a painting get born? For me, it’s sometimes a memory being re-played, hearing a song lyric that resonates with me, reading a poem that lends itself to telling a story or visiting an inspiring art exhibit. This series focuses on the connection between stories described in the written word, such as poetry, song lyrics, and quotes and the visual narratives that illustrate these works. The works may describe a feeling, a memory, a season, or some universal truth described in color, metaphor or symbols. Perhaps this series has been percolating in me for years, since 2005, in fact, when I graduated from McDaniel College with an art degree. My art mentor, Steve Pearson, who is now (Assistant Professor at McDaniel College), sparked an interest in me about how to make artwork that communicated personal truths and ideas.
To facilitate the creative process, he recommended that I keep a sketchbook and collect artwork that inspired me. This process would help me to identify the themes that mattered most to me and to write a content-based artist statement. Lastly, I created a series of work that described these themes through color, symbols, composition, etc. It’s been several years since then and I have had a lot of experiences since then, read books, listened to music, attended concerts, had different jobs, and pursued different artistic subject media, such as the portrait, and more recently still life and landscape. But I keep coming back to artwork that has a meaning or a story to tell in my artwork, and especially to the portrait which was the first subject that ignited my interest in art. One significant event that sparked this recurrent theme, and they are: 1.) A drawing class that I took at Frederick Community College.
In January of 2015, I took a drawing course at Frederick Community College in Frederick, MD. One of the final assignments I tackled was to illustrate a poem using pastels. A major challenge in this assignment was to find a poem that had some concrete images to illustrate and not a poem that was too esoteric and abstract. I chose Robert Frost’s poem, Ghost House, which has an abundance of concrete imagery. The first lines, “I dwell in a lonely house I know, that vanished nearly a summer ago and left no trace but the cellar walls…” (Frost) gripped me with a strong visual picture. I immediately thought of a derelict house and tried to create a narrative about this haunted house.
Slowly different images popped into my head, a derelict house, a ghost bride, a tree, a path, and some crows. To facilitate this process, I collected artwork that inspired on Google image searches and checked out library books on vampires and fantasy creatures. My next step was to create a Photoshop file collage with images based on this poem. I completed the artwork by creating a drawing based off of the collage and finished with soft pastels. To create this current body of work, I have followed this same process of creating a notebook of images that inspired, and piecing them together in PhotoShop to create my own unique compositions. I also did searches on Pinterest for the artwork of interest and looked for examples of poetry illustrations to see how other artists have tackled this subject. And I read books on poetry or did Google searches to look for poems that lent themselves visual depiction. Some of the poetry that has inspired these works is verses written by Emily Dickinson, Maya Angelou, Robert Frost, and T.S. Elliot.
Thank you for stopping by and reading my artist statement! Have a wonderful week!
What stories do we tell as artists in the work we create? In my work, I am finding that poetry is a wonderful jumping off point for creating artwork which tells a story. There is so much feeling, and sometimes imagery to mine, which can be easily translated to the fine arts. For instance, in my pastel drawing, Ghost House, (2015), I interpreted the Ghost House poem by Robert Frost. After I had read the poem, I tried to pick lines out of it that seemed to lend themselves to visuals. First I thought of a haunted house, and then I began to think about who might inhabit it. Later on, the idea of including a ghost bride and some crows popped into my head. Thus, the story of a haunted house was born.
This excerpt was cited on:
www.poets.org.
I dwell in a lonely house I know That vanished many a summer ago, And left no trace but the cellar walls, And a cellar in which the daylight falls And the purple-stemmed wild raspberries grow. (Robert Frost, Ghost House)
Art of Schmidt 