John Schmidtberger ’79: Canvasing Light

As a plein air painter — one who paints outdoors with particular focus on conveying the quality of light and atmosphere — John Schmidtberger ’79 is particularly subject to nature’s vagaries. A gust can top plea canvas, a squall can darken the sky. Once, a team of draft horses, escapees from a county fair, nearly ran him down in a Maine blueberry barren. (After a farmer collected the run aways, Schmidtberger resumed painting, trepidatiously.)

And, of course, the environment itself must move him.

“I start out just looking around a lot,” he says. “I try to keep a journal of places and things.” He maintains a supply of canvases and panels, primed to a brilliant white via many coats of Gesso. He likes how white underpins the translucent colors he layers on top, and if he leaves an area unpainted, he wants it to be a “very strong, pure white so it can function as a color.”

His work often features water and earth, with some houses and the occasional human figure. Some landscapes, awash in lavender, seem painted just at the moment they’re waking up; others incandesce under a high sun. Many depict Down East Maine, where he and his wife, also an artist, have visited for decades.  “Artists have been going to Maine forever for the light,” he says. “It’s a very hard, clear but warm light, with very little atmospheric perspective, meaning that as things disappear into the distance, they don’t have that blueing haze.”

He paints outdoors for one to three hours, and tries to finish in one session “because of conditions, but also be causeof my nature,” he says. “I need to be in this incredibly intensively focused state… to gather and fortify myself and really get ready, almost like training for a marathon. I have to bring really good energy to it.”

It’s joyful, yet lonely, work. He misses the hubbub of Exeter — a “whole new world” — where he took sculpture and filmmaking, and the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied painting under Neil Welliver, chairman of the university’s Graduate School of Fine Art.

“You’ve had all this camaraderie and constant critiques and input from people, and you get out and it just vanishes,” he says. For decades after graduating, he and his wife ran a decorative-painting business while raising two children. It was hard enough painting on his own, let alone building an artists’ community.

“It was a real struggle, and a very alone struggle,” he says. Serendipity struck in 2011, when a friend mentioned a small down town storefront only 90 minutes from New York. Their exchange was brief:

Friend: “You should rent it.”

Schmidtberger: “What for?”

Friend: “It’s a good deal. Figure it out later.”

And so he did, opening SFA Gallery in picturesque Frenchtown, New Jersey. Since then, a community has coalesced, including long-lost graduate school friends, other artists he has followed for years and finally contacted, and new artists seeking a venue. Having established a loyal clientele, he has found more time to paint on his own. Occasionally, he’ll head a few blocks away to paint street scenes, leaving a hand-drawn map on the gallery door for visitors to find him.

“I never intended to be a gallerist, but I’m very happy I am,” he says. Like all artists, Schmidtberger sometimes hits a wall. “They tell people in art school (and it’s really terrible advice), ‘Never stop working,’” he says.

But he has found he cannot force the creative intensity painting entails. If inspiration wanes, he’ll focus his artistic energy elsewhere— cartooning, preparing canvases, figure-drawing — until sooner or later, his emotional weather shifts, and he’s ready to head outdoors and court serendipity again.