Artist Statement
Updated: February 6, 2024
And now as we await the total eclipse of 2024, I know in my heart this an important year for my art to shine!
For years I have been intrigued by subject challenges such as faces devoid of race or gender, caricatures, silhouettes, movement, color, blending techniques, etc. In 2017, however, my creative intuition radically changed.
When I saw the total Eclipse of 2017, something in me shifted, and my art shifted too. It was surreal watching the sun completely disappear behind the moon, I remember laughing and clapping and holding back tears of pure joy. The earth around me was dark at 1:21 in the afternoon in the tiny town of Makanda, Illinois, a place I called home for many years. The bursts of bright light pointing out like lasers behind the blackened moon was like watching a show staged in another world. The clouds passing by looked like angels, and they connected that world to ours. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
The first few years after the eclipse, I felt a need to create more powerful and intense art. I completely shifted mediums, from translucent gouache paints corralled in silhouettes on 11” x 14” watercolor paper, to thick, unbounded acrylics on large canvas. My background in watercolor and gouache naturally lead me to explore more fluid techniques with acrylics.
As time travels, so I did too and opened myself to creating art to help others create art, because it is an amazing experience that I wanted others to know. Originally this was to be in a local studio, but when Covid stepped in, I adapted my plans and developed ArtKits.com. This has been an amazing journey to constantly push myself to learn and discover new art forms and techniques. It has also led to me to new ideas that will be in my new creations that I will be sharing throughout this year. Stay tuned!!!!
Always exploring and experimenting with new ideas, I combine old and new techniques with interesting subjects, resulting in somewhat abstract portrayals of nature, with a special emphasis on activity in the skies, including the sun and moon, the colors, the flow of air just above the horizon. I create my art for the sake of realizing it, not necessarily as a gift to individual people in my life, and so it is free to find its rightful owner.
The air becomes itself, gaining and losing strength, freezing, blazing, blowing pretty-as-you-please in a warm summer breeze, or twisting into a tornado as one particle flows into the other, and another, anew at every interval. This is evolution. This is me. This is my art.
Welcome to my world.
~ Leann Schmidt
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