Laurie Schmidt Studio 108 Lmmccombs@gmail.com

Laurie Schmidt's first career as a potter lasted more than 30 years. After studying with Warren MacKenzie at the U. of Minnesota she built her first solo studio and hi-fire kiln near the U. of Maryland. She was a founding member in 1973 of the Torpedo Factory, a large cooperative of studios and galleries in Alexandria, Va. located in an old World War II facility.

Laurie currently divides her time between studying painting and studying printmaking at OSU. In painting Laurie will set up a still life and paint it somewhat realistically. She then gets frustrated with it (which seems to be a crucial part of the process for her). She starts to destroy the painting (another crucial element), even if it's something she's spent many, many hours painting. Edges blur, colors blend one on top of another, recognizable shapes morph, frustration disappears and is replaced with excitement. The work is now an abstract painting with a life of its own.

Laurie's intaglio prints are usually derived from her own drawings of live models. Her relief prints are really monoprints because after they've been printed in the conventional way, she starts to manipulate them by adding more ink, changing colors and shapes, until the prints are no longer an edition but one of a kind works although each has the identical foundation. For the most part, Laurie's screen prints are done on canvas and are called monotypes because each one is different from the next. When she prints several canvases that are clearly similar with only minor differences, they're called an edition variable.