“I left Manhattan this morning to come see you all.”

“Whoa, hold on…all the way from Manhattan, New York? The Big Apple?”

“Oh no, dear. Manhattan, Kansas. The Little Apple, they call it.”

She might be from the “The Little Apple,” but her work is creating quite the impact and it’s everything but little.

On Feb. 26 in Gardner Auditorium, visiting artist Teresa Schmidt walked Wayne State students through her journey as an artist and her love for the spontaneity of drawn gesture. Schmidt shared the works of various artists that inspired her own highly expressive gestural style, as well as how she uses abstraction to express powerful emotions relating to personal events.

“My exhibit is a search for form, compositional form,” Schmidt said. “I want my work to be mostly about expression. My goal is for the viewer to find an image within the piece.”

Aside from finding inspiration in books and personal stories, many of Schmidt’s works are also based on poetry.

“For my painting titled ‘Miles to Go,’ I was actually listening to Miles Davis, when the poem ‘Miles to Go’ by Robert Frost crossed my mind and I thought ‘we’re gonna keep going’,” Schmidt said. “I liked it because it happened so fast and I proceeded to make many other drawings after that.”

The mark-making master also provided some inspiration for WSC students.
“She just uses a remarkable amount of lines, shapes and forms,” senior Sharon Carr said. “She also talked about perspective and that’s something I need to work on, so it’s nice to hear her take on it.”

If you haven’t already seen some of Schmidt’s work, it will featured through March 26 in the Nordstrand Visual Arts Gallery on the second floor of the Fine Arts Building.

“Simply put, this exhibit highlights the joy of mark making,” art professor Wayne Anderson said.