In an indeterminate place

Above the Clouds

For many years, the name Peter Schmidt was uniquely asso­ci­ated in my mind with Brian Eno. It was Schmidt who did the cover art for Tak­ing Tiger Moun­tain (By Strat­egy) and Evening Star, it was also he who made the four prints included with early press­ings of Before and After Sci­ence and who col­lab­o­rated with Eno on Oblique Strate­gies, and Eno often spoke of him in inter­views, men­tion­ing his sad­ness at Schmidt’s untimely death. Attracted by the work, impressed by the high esteem in which Eno held him, and admit­tedly intrigued by the rel­a­tive lack of infor­ma­tion that seemed to be avail­able about him, I recall sniff­ing around for any­thing I might find out about Peter Schmidt in the pre-internet days of the late ’70s and early ’80s but came up with noth­ing of con­se­quence and even­tu­ally gave up.

Well, nowa­days of course it’s peo­ple and things that don’t exist on the inter­net that are the excep­tion, and for­tu­nately that is no longer the case of Peter Schmidt. In Jan­u­ary 2008 John Emr cre­ated a web­site and a blog devoted to Schmidt, and both are invalu­able resources for those who wish to learn more about the artist and view a broad sam­pling of his work. The blog in par­tic­u­lar is inter­est­ing in that it con­tains exam­ples of fin­ished pieces, prepara­tory sketches and notes for paint­ings, writ­ings, and a vari­ety of ephemera about Schmidt, pub­lic show­ings of his work, etc. Through his con­tact with Schmidt’s fam­ily, friends, and col­lec­tors Emr is able to present many pieces that I imag­ine have never been dis­played pub­licly before. Col­lec­tively, they give an idea of the sur­pris­ing breadth of Schmidt’s work, and allow us bet­ter appre­ci­ate what he was able to accom­plish in his unfor­tu­nately brief life.

I’ll admit a bias for his water­color still-lifes and land­scapes, many of which are strik­ing exam­ples of the under­stated beauty of oth­er­wise mun­dane objects and unspec­tac­u­lar scenes and views. These to me embody what is most inter­est­ing about Schmidt’s work: its indif­fer­ence to the mon­u­men­tal and the superla­tive, and its focus on the quiet, the “insignif­i­cant,” the inti­mate. For this rea­son I have always thought that Schmidt’s phrase, “In a room­ful of shout­ing peo­ple, the one who whis­pers becomes inter­est­ing,” was a per­fect epi­graph to both his work and the posi­tion he occu­pied in the art world of his time.

You can see a selec­tion of Peter Schmidt’s paint­ings in the Peter Schmidt gallery. Hav­ing vis­ited the gallery, I hope you will feel suf­fi­ciently inspired to explore John Emr’s web­site and blog, listed below.

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• Peter Schmidt Web
• Peter Schmidt Weblog

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Tagged: Brian Eno, interesting blog, Oblique Strategies, painting, Peter Schmidt, watercolor

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