Here at Supertouch, we’re obsessed with technique, and pure, unadulterated rendering power. NYC-based 24-year-old Canadian artist AUREL SCHMIDT has those qualities to spare. Emerging from the East Village art scene with a style as distinct as her name, Schmidt is the rare artist with profound imagination, sheer technical power and a fantastic sense of humor who is able to switch between hyper-detailed obsessive/compulsive technical rendering and fun, simple, Pop-inspired imagery with ease. Her medium of choice remains pencil & crayon on paper but the incredible detail and complex tones of her tightly executed imagery give her fantastic tableaux’s the depth of oil paintings. Among portrait artists, Schmidt remains an anomaly. The faces she paints are not those of humans or animals, but of imagined beings woven together with the found debris of the natural world, including insects, flowers, rocks, and dead animals, which she mixes in images of household trash, giving her work a rare and grisly beauty. HAVE A LOOK: (more…)