John Schmidtberger is a painter and gallerist from Upper Black Eddy, PA. He paints plein-air style in Bucks and Hunterdon county as well as coastal Maine. His paintings have been described as modern and poetic, with a strong sense of light, deliberate brushwork, and a vivid palette. In 2011 John founded Schmidtberger Fine Art (SFA Gallery) in Frenchtown, NJ.
John grew up in Schooley’s Mountain, New Jersey and attended Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire on a scholarship. At the University of Pennsylvania, he studied painting, drawing, sculpture and printmaking with Neil Welliver (1929-2005), Robert Engman (1927-2018) and Hitoshi Nakazato (1936-2010) earning a BFA in 1984 and an MFA in 1987. After graduating, he co-founded Brushworks, Inc., one of the area’s first decorative painting companies.
In recent years John has won a number of awards, including first place in The Art of the River Towns Juried Show (2020) and The Patrons’ Award for Painting in both the 2020 and 2021 Phillips Mill Annual Juried Exhibitions.
John is represented in such private collections as Mitchell Zuckerman, Formerly Sotheby’s Executive Vice President of Global Auction Transactions; Richard Goode, renowned classical pianist; Kate White, author and editor-in-chief at Cosmopolitan; Mark Rosenthal, screenwriter; William Tally, academy-award-winning screenwriter; Daniel R. Tishman, Vice ¬Chairman, AECOM and CEO, Tishman Construction; Stephen McDonnell, Founder, Applegate Farms and Jill Kearney, Founder, ArtYard. His work has been reviewed in the New York Times, and appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine and Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine.
Statement
I search for places and situations that I find compelling, spending a great deal of time just looking. When I find what I'm looking for I feel it like a physical sensation, a jolt. Then I paint as quickly and directly as possible, in order to describe my experience. I’m not interested in details. Instead, I ask "What is the gesture? What is the rhythm? What is the light doing? What is the mood? What is the essence?”
I’m very interested in economy—getting the most visual information from the fewest visual elements. I ask, “How can I make each mark and color count, each inch of the canvas matter?
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