Aurel Schmidt is a 26 year old artist who moved from Vancouver to New York a few years ago. Her immaculate drawings exhibit exquisite detail. She creates wacky images using bits and pieces of leaves, bugs, butterflies, and other elements from nature. Many of the images are quite beautiful from a distance, and then you're thrown for a loop when you get up close and see that the bigger image is created with groupings of tiny bugs.
So she spends her remaining time in a comfortable chair by a window at the studio. She painted years ago but with more mental interference, she said, making it more of an “intellectual pursuit” than the urgent, spontaneous process it is now. Now the brush itself seems to decide what to paint.
“I paint what comes out,” she said. “It’s not intellectual — it’s instinctive.”
She paints rapidly and spontaneously and her images are primal and powerful. There are urgent brush strokes, bold colors and bleak backgrounds. There are faces laughing and others cringing. There are winged characters flying into the beyond. There are people hugging each other. Different as they are, she said, they all reflect aspects of her condition.
She says the terminal illness has simplified things, washing away the worry and petty preoccupations that almost made life more hard when she had plenty of it. And she has never felt more connected to the canvas and to her creativity.
