Maryann Schmidt is a veteran artist
who specializes in close-up realism paintings. She loves expressing vast contrasts
of light, emphasizing shadows or highlights, and creates a three dimensional image
on an otherwise two dimensional platform. She enjoys the visual of multiples,
as seen through the repetition of subjects through her almost pattern-like work.
Schmidt likes to slightly alter her pattern as she goes to create diversity ad
catch the eye, as seen through the various shapes of the glass bottles and
lettering seen on them. When painting her pieces, she says the spends the most
time focusing on the folds, curves, and smoothness of the glass in relation to
the spacing and depth of her image. She hopes to instill a feeling of largeness
in her paintings, both from the way she paints the perspective and the enormous
scale of her canvas mediums.
I was
drawn to Schmidt’s paintings because the way she paints light through glass is
so striking and realistic. The coloring she uses from her eye for light is mesmerizing
and beautiful to look at, and all plays into the depth and dimension of her
subjects. In paintings featuring books rather than bottles, the stacks of books
looked so vivid and life-like with the amount of detail given to shadows and contrast.
I especially appreciate her works because to me, it emphasizes a value of appreciating
the small details of life. Her pieces capture a small frame of a beautiful
moment of reality of something people may not usually stop to look at or
appreciate. It also does something that is often hard to do: make those who see
it feel small. Using angles, different perspectives, or even a large canvas
like Schmidt does can make otherwise small or mundane objects feel larger than
life. For me, this adds to how the artist views the glass bottles as something
to behold, and allows me to feel small in a world where I otherwise feel plain
and ordinary.
No comments:
Post a Comment