Photorealist painter, Brad Schmidt has depicted the Navajo people for the past 15 years. Recently, the artist was honored by a Navajo group asking Schmidt for paintings to represent the Navajo people at a worldwide convention.

Schmidt has always had a strong interest in history, other belief systems and living customs. He attended community college to study history. In his 20s he began a decade-long expatriate experience in South and Central America-teaching art and sending paintings back to his patrons and galleries. While living abroad he painted rural tropical scenes and figures from native cultures in the Caribbean, Central American, and Mexico. It was there that his two favorite subjects combined, people and painting, in figure painting and portraits.

By the time he decided to return to the United States, much of his family had moved to Arizona so he relocated there. Today, the artist, lives with his wife and two teenage children outside of Phoenix, AZ, and uses a room of the house as his studio.

Schmidt chooses his subjects carefully, looking for faces full of character. He hires individuals as models, sets up scenes, dresses them in clothes with the specific colors and textures he wants. The Schmidt family often helps, either sew the pieces of clothing or locating antique clothing.

Source:
Campbell, Virginia "Across Cultures" SouthwestArt" November 2004

Born in Southern California, Brad Schmidt had his first art lessons from his father, a full time painter. Raised in a family of artists, Brad also had the good fortune to meet and do yard work for artist Ray Swanson (CAA) who taught him how to work with watercolors during the early stages of his burgeoning career.

In 1971, fifteen-year-old Brad began to sell professionally through his father's gallery, his work hanging along side master painters such as R. Brownell McGrew. Soon after high school graduation, Brad had his work accepted into Gallery Americana in Carmel. It was in Carmel that he met and became friends with the late, great American watercolorist Donald Teague, an artist who would have a profound influence on Brad's painting.

In 1975, Brad moved from California to Arizona, joined another major gallery and traveled and painted extensively throughout the United States. Beginning in 1982, he spent ten years traveling in Latin America where he painted and taught art in an international school before returning home to the United States. In 1987, Brad joined other family members for a successful show at the Western Desert Caballeros Museum in Wickenburg, Arizona.

Referring to his paintings as "character studies" rather than portraits, he has a painting technique that approaches photo realism, infused with soft edged brushwork. Today, Brad is known for his oil paintings that capture people of older, still existing cultures such as those found in Mexico and various other countries in Central and South America. He has also spent the last 15 years studying and painting the Navajo Indian.