David Lillington, London 2004

1

'I start with the idea, then take photos, combine them, cut them out, make a
collage, make some drawings, sort out what's important: how to push the
idea to a point that will open things up for the viewer. I do a very
basic drawing on the canvas and start to paint. I try to surprise
myself by making something I myself have not seen before.

'Initially, with the portraits, I wanted to describe people, but not only by
showing their physiological features, so I began to show the surroundings
as a way of trying to define something about them. After a while the more
comprehensive character of the architecture or the landscape seemed like
something that could be exchanged for the figures. At that point the real
subject became you and me, everyone.'

2

'Poussin in his idealised landscapes always seems to be hinting that there
might be so many possible interpretations that you will have to make up
your own. In this way they reveal the wish of both artist and viewer for a
painting which is at once general and individual. Otherwise you can just
stick to some historian's interpretation. That's what most people do
anyway.
'Similarly Titian's late pieces are compelling for viewers expecting a
familiar subject, but also offer an autonomous language with which they
have to deal.'

'I've chosen a narrow field but the feelings are universal. We all feel
hope, loneliness, fear, comfort, the limitations of time and our own
power. And we see these things in the faces of friends we know well. At
this point we are making a portrait. This has always been a part of human
history.

3

'To me the photos I do are sketches that remind me of situations I've been
in. I also use them as collages to make or remake scenery. I try to make
something new out of this material. The photos help me to devise a
composition.
'This moment, the photographic moment, suggests a presence, an identity,
but one which is still limited by external influences.' One wonders if the
frequent barriers, jetties and posts are another indication of this notion.

4

Bruegel's 'Jäger im Schnee' uses time to convey a sense of space. The
distances are emphasised by the narrative: the hunters, who have almost the
same view of the landscape as the viewer, are moving, at a walking pace,
down into the heart of it. In other words our grasp of time helps indicate
the distance involved, not just our grasp of perspective. The viewer
travels with the hunters.

Is Schmied interested in narrative? Yes, but the narrative is always
stalled, is always about to happen. Time in his pictures is always the time
between coming and going: the figures are still but look as if they are
about to get up and go. Since the paintings are also about what landscape
might be, this throws the interest back on the figure looking at it. There
is in this way a certain here-and-nowness about them.
'If portrait and landscape are combined it's to emphasise an idea of being
delivered and yet thrown back on one's own existence, on the quest for
personal definition. In this way a landscape becomes a generalised
portrait. Often there are aspects of my own wishes and fears in it.' But
one would hesitate to call the paintings romantic.

5

One painting echoes Friedrich's 'Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer'.
Schmied's figure sits on a concrete bulwark, but the misty distance reaches as far as in Friedrich's picture. But in Schmied's painting we are there behind him, on the boardwalk, taking the photo perhaps, while Friedrich's wanderer is very much on his own.

'Various psychological ideas go to make up what is expressed. But I'm not
my own psychiatrist, to deal with all this complexity. But you do have to
work out how to put together a number of elements from various sources.
Because the starting point is something intimate I use colours and
composition as poetic expressions to draw the viewer in. From that point
it's best he does his own thinking. It's not up to me to tell others what
they see. My thoughts are not a dogma. I'd rather keep them to myself.

'From the beginning I was attracted by the idea of unlimited space set against
the reality of the limitations of space. Using myself in a composition
also implies my absence. I could be replaced by someone else. In the end
this character, me, becomes a mere spectator.'

6

Malcolm Andrews: 'Johann Gottfried Herder argued two centuries ago, that
environment moulded personality, that the structure of the earth shaped the
ways in which we thought. Carl Ritter reinforced these views in the
1830s: The very productions of the soil have been interwoven, as it were,
into the texture of the human mind.'

'I cannot see that there's anything particularly geographically specific
about my work. It doesn't seem to be typically Austrian. Obviously one
picks up certain things over the years. But in any case the way I do
paintings is more important than any geographical topic.'

7

While Gainsborough's Mr and Mrs Andrews, a portrait and landscape, is
easy to interpret in terms of ownership of land, romantic artists such as
Friedrich also deal with power: dominion, a sense of inner power. Owning
psychologically.
And water is one of the most contested of territories. The shipping
forecast is about ownership.
Schmied's figure looks down into water, or a blank piece of paper,
wondering what lies beneath, or what might come to the surface.
Simon Schama writes of the 'relationship between water and the power over
life and death' (in reference to Luigi Vanitelli's elaborate water features
at the palace at Casenta). Water has often represented painting itself -
see Monet - the simultaneous interest in a surface and what lies beneath
it. The what-lies-beneath doesn't exist without the surface. And water
represents life, according to Schama. It's almost as if Schmied is
looking across the history of landscape painting when he looks across the
lake. This character in the picture, who may or may not be Johann Schmied,
doesn't look like he feels he owns it. He looks somewhere between being
comfortable and being uneasy.
Very often there are the barriers which often come with the man-made places
which overlook nature. We are on a platform looking at nature.

'American art is said to be pragmatic. I also try to be pragmatic. So I
took a close look
From Precisionism to Alex Katz.
Sunlight in an Empty Room, Hopper said, is a kind of self-portrait.

8

Pliny: 'it is a great pleasure to look down on the countryside from the
mountain, for the view seems to be a painted scene of unusual beauty rather
than a real landscape.'

Constable: 'When I sit down to make a sketch from nature, the first thing I
try to do is, to forget that I have ever seen a picture.'
This seems unthinkable now. But perhaps it was for Constable too. Peter
Bishop: 'Constable was aware that paradox lay within such a notion of
direct seeing and realised that if it was to be of value then it had to be
explicitly soulful, metaphorical, poetic.' And, 'rather than trying to see
through a veil, or a glass darkly, the tradition that Constable was
identified with was more interested in the veil, or glass, itself.'

9

Andrews: since Cézanne the sublime happens anywhere - once the veil of
familiarity has been lifted.

There is something strange about Schmied's paintings. They're always a
slice of something bigger but they're also focused and self-contained. The
is drawn toward a distant horizon but the foreground shows things which are
very close and bulky, too close to be seen except in part, so more tactile
and immediate. The viewer is aware of the use of photography, but the
peculiar mixture of artificial and real is only in part the result of its
use, the chief effect of which is to affect the sense of time. There's
something about the composition: the framing is solid, but somehow
eccentric. All the man-made things jut into the picture, only nature is
self-contained.

'Of course it's complicated. So I try to take the path of simplicity,
which will leave things open as well defining a clear image. When I first
decided to do landscapes I wanted to do something many people do. It's a
type of folk art. Of course once you reflect on it even a little you're in
the position of a being a painter doing landscapes and watching himself at
the same time. It's like a snake biting its own tail.

Books quoted

Malcolm Andrews, Landscape and Western Art, Oxford, 1999

Peter Bishop, An Archetypal Constable: national Identity and the Geography of
Nostalgia, Athlone, 1995

Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, Fontana, 1996