Artist’s Story of Eliza M. Schmid
Needless to say, growing up in post-war Austria in an academic family, there was no way my parents would have tolerated my attending art school in Vienna, although I had been drawing and painting since early childhood with great enthusiasm. Also, by age 17, when I graduated from my Austrian high school, I was not sure whether I had the talent necessary for a career in art. Many, many years later, I attended a conference for psychiatrists in Santa Fe, NM. A local artist, Amy Stein, gave a workshop on self portrait painting as a form of learning more about oneself. When she walked around to look at our “masterworks” she studied my self portrait and asked me if I were a professional artist. I said, no, the last time I drew was in medical school. So she said: “if you are not an artist now, I think you should be one!”
She had read my soul. I flew home to Los Angeles, bought enamel paint and began painting on bottles, something that I had been thinking about doing for a long time. Also bottles cost nothing if I messed up. For two years I painted every bottle I could get hold of and started selling them in CA craft fairs. Finally I decided to paint on a flat surface which was again glass, but on top of a print or drawing underneath the glass. The result was unusual; it seems that very few people, if any at all, had ever done that before. My first show in a gallery in St. Monica almost sold out. Today, eight years later, as a retired psychiatrist and full time artist, I still like the magic and complexity of painting in several layers by allowing something of the over-painted picture shine through the subsequent layer. In the last two years I have used letters of various languages and scripts on top of layers of background paintings. Frequently I weave the writing into parts of the underlying pictures.
I am sure that this hiding and revealing, the interplay of the unconscious mind with consciousness, the tension between the superego-ego-id are my own unconscious processes projected on canvas. Using beautiful letters has something to do with all the reading of beautiful books about the human mind. In terms of subjects and themes I have a supply for the next hundred years from listening to thousands of patients as a psychiatrist.