Schmid

Since moving to Hornby Island in 1997, I have been inspired to paint the particular sensory delights to be found on my Island home. Honeycombed sandstone, bleached beach logs and the golden pelt of grasses on the bluffs continue to fascinate and lead my gaze upward to the overreaching sky. Immense and ever changing, the sky and clouds provide an endlessly challenging subject to study and paint.

Sky gazing invites sensations of expansiveness and feelings of quiet awe at the endless variations in this vast and stately dance of form and colour.

"Part of the charm of living on an Island, surrounded by water, is the presence of edges. Hornby is particularly blessed with a variety of coastal features, including steep rocky cliffs, sandy beaches, pebbly beaches and astonishingly shapely sandstone. The particular view that I've painted includes the water and sky that surround us, as well as glimpses of our unique coastline. I love this view because of the feeling of looking out into vastness and still seeing where it is I'm looking out from; the near and the degrees of far."

I am also moved to paint the potent images that appear in dreams and visions. Glowing vessels, animals, trees, vivid with inner light, these imaginary figures exist in the realm of archetypes. They inhabit another kind of space, which I attempt to describe with pigment and brushwork.

In all my work, it is my intention to provide a sense of luminous presence, evoking feeling and sensation in the viewer.

Ah, not to be cut off,

Not through the slightest partition

Shut out from the law of the stars.

The inner - what is it?

If not intensified sky,

Hurled through with birds and deep

With the winds of homecoming.

Rainer Maria Rilke