About The Artist

My name is Ruth Schmidt, nee Ilonka. Born in Transylvania in 1982, today I live and work in Budapest (Hungary). By profession, I am an accountant. The dreary nature of numbers didn’t make me happy, so I was constantly looking for something different. I tried many jobs, but none of these jobs satisfied my needs for creativity. Finally, at the prompting of a friend, I took up painting in my spare time, initially with acrylic on canvas. Soon I realised my skills were inadequate to convey my feelings and perceptions. I then explored further education by attending various drawing and painting classes. The breakthrough happened in 2017, when I met a wonderful artist, my Master, Kalman Gasztonyi and I became his student. The past few years, I have been evolving my painting skills by completing many study paintings of old masters. I particularly like the work of Piet Mondrian, Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali, Albert Bierstadt, Rembrandt van Rijn, Karoly Marko …. These names bear witness I enjoy experimenting with different styles and techniques. If I had to categorize my paintings, I could divide it into two main parts: The first strand of my work is pop-art and Mondrian-inspired geometric figural paintings. The second strand of my paintings are my symbolist paintings, which strike sometimes into surrealism and ‘speak the unspeakable’. My Master, Kalman Gasztonyi writes about me: “Ruth Schmidt draws on the knowledge of the masters of past centuries, using their painting techniques to address the people of the 21st century. Her works, painted with the biggest professional shyness and fantastic precision, provide an aesthetic visual experience that is unmistakably unique to her. The paintings are narratives where the bare experience gets enriched with stories and feelings. Ruth’s basic nature is fun, a positive worldview, humor. Unfortunately, humor is having less and less space in contemporary painting, even though it is one of the greatest gifts of our lives. Fortunately, the Creator was generous with this gift to Ruth. The depiction of divine power also appears in her paintings, as her faith is very important to her. Her painting is perhaps best characterized by symbolism, but surrealism also appears occasionally. After all her ‘study paintings’ we will not find in her work a simple still life, or landscape or classically planned compositions. There is always a ‘twist’ by Ruth out there that transcends and makes the realistic painting to art.”