Bill Schmidt

Bill Schmidt has been a professional landscape painter for more than 30 years after careers as a nuclear engineer, consultant, and founder and president of a training firm.  His art training consisted of working with several superb outdoor landscape painters and studying the masters of French and American Impressionism and the New England school of marine painters. (His undergraduate degree from Cornell University was in chemical and nuclear engineering.)

His distinctive paintings are realistic yet impressionistic, painterly but with enough attention to detail so that the subject matter is easily recognizable.  He paints outdoors in all seasons at home and in his travels, from New England to California and in Venice, Paris, and Bermuda.  Even the foreign scenes are mostly done en plein air using a Pochade Box and archival boards when it’s too difficult to fly with a full-size easel.  Blogs on this website describe how he creates a painting and some history about his key instructors.

Bill lives in Rockville, MD, a suburb of Washington, DC, with his wife, Dottie; they have three children and five grandchildren. Besides painting, Bill enjoys reading about art and artists, visiting art museums, and attending opera and theater.  When working in his studio, he always paints to opera recordings because the music energizes him!