Jay Schmidt

Artist Bio

Jay Schmidt was born in Chester, Pennsylvania in 1952 and currently resides in Bozeman, Montana. He earned a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1974 and completed his MFA at the University of California, Davis two years later. In 2007 he retired from a twenty-six year career as a professor in the School of Art at Montana State University. His enormous paintings engulf the viewer—one is swaddled in colors, bombarded with madness, with the obsessiveness of modern-day consumerism, commercialism, and war-mongering—all spiraling beyond sanity like a tornado of society. It is this kind of experience, this topsy-turvy urgency, that gets beneath your skin and drains the breath from your body.