artist’s statement

Nina Schmidt thinks back to a time when someone asked her what she wants to be when she grows up. The hard answer was “an artist,” the easy answer was “a mommy.” After much deliberation, she drew a picture of herself with a dress on and eventually she became both. It is not an obvious path that stretches between that innocent question and where she sits today, balancing her daughter on one knee and holding a stained paintbrush in one hand. A half-finished picture loaded with lines and colors stares back at her from its place on an easel. For years she got paid to practice her painting on other people’s walls, before that there was a failed attempt at drawing classes in college, before that she was being home-schooled and taking private music and art lessons and before that there was a nameless urge to create that resulted in crayons worn down to smeary stubs.

“Art should be three things,” she says, “Functional, livable and beautiful.” She is surrounded by the accouterments of a life being lived: curled tubes of paint, a pile of laundry, drawings and sculptures made by her children, trails of crushed cereal. The canvas before her is the latest in a long line of painted surfaces—furniture, appliances, her husband’s skateboards. Even the walls of her home are constantly changing hues.

For Nina, the act of painting is not so much about the subject, but about the relationships between colors. The reds rarely sit still. The blues start in the sky, but move lower and begin to cover birds, boats, a field of corn. Orange shows up along the back of a horse or on the trunks of trees. The lines and brush strokes are her way of trying to make sense of what she sees. Only the colors are real, the rest of the composition is space between colors.

She daubs more color on the canvas. Nina believes art should be attainable to anyone, and she lives that belief with a fierce, if sometimes tired, determination. Not having the luxury of her own studio or even much time to herself during the day, the intensely private act of bringing her inner world to life with paint has become a part of her public persona. If her only goal was self-expression, the art she makes would still be wonderful, but she paints to bring beauty to small spaces and ordinary people. She paints to make the world a more colorful place for her family and friends and for that little girl who is asked to make a choice between two things and decides somewhere along the way that art is not a privilege but a necessity.

Bio written by: Steev Baker