Reagan Schmissrauter creates visionary work
Chattanooga is home to a bevy of incredible figurative artists, one of whom is using his realism skills to create colorful visionary works. Though he has an extensive portfolio of traditional portrait and landscape work, Reagan Schmissrauter is best known for his imaginative illustrations.
His work has been featured in several publications, and on the cover of Lauren Antrosiglio’s book “This Glorious Oblivion”.
“Poetry, literature, music, and art have always been an intrinsic part of humanity,” he says by way of explaining the strong philosophical background to his art. “From the very beginning of civilization, we created art. It is a creative way to express life and emotion; it is a way to capture the beauty of life.”
Schmissrauter believes that art is about releasing this emotion, and feeling, into a physical piece of artwork. He makes art, he says, because he feels a need to create and leave a footprint behind on this planet.
“To me, it is about healing the soul, creating something greater than ourselves,” he says. “It is related to language, religion, physics, math, biology, and many other subjects. Art is the glue that holds history together. It is basically a visual journal for our lives, a reflection of creation—it’s about recording the things we love and want to express. It is a humanistic expression of life and passion—we create art because we are free in what we need to express to the world.”
He was inspired at a young age by his brother, Mark Schmissrauter Jr., and his mother Virginia Schmissrauter. He started drawing when he was a toddler, and has been making art ever since.
“Art is an expression of the soul. It is an act of creating something that means something to each of us. Art is an instinctual act—most people make it at an early age, with crayons and paper—at that age, everyone is an artist.”
He focused on painting during high school at Baylor, under Laura Willet, before graduating from Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts. He was moved by the work of the master artists Michelangelo, da Vinci, Van Gogh, Mary Cassatt, Robert Henri, Edward Hopper, Renoir and Monet.
After finishing school, he continued his education by apprenticing under master painter and sculptor Daud Akhriev for a year. He has since been deeply moved and inspired by artists in the local art community, including Jas Milam, Anne Meinert, Carol Lockrow, Melissa Hefferlin, Marguerite Anderson, Margaret Dyer, James Courtney, Timur Akhriev, Joy Thomas, and Elena Burykina.
Schmissrauter works primarily with oil, pastels, charcoal, and Conte crayons. He uses his hands and a pencil to measure his subjects, translating them proportionally onto the paper or canvas. His use of color is liberal, his palettes intense and highly saturated, which give his paintings a surreal, dreamlike quality.
He paints with oil paints on luan, first drawing with the brush directly and developing patterns of light/dark and value. His subjects are things that he loves—family, pets, beautiful atmospheres and environments, all rendered with bright colors. He studies sacred geometry, and employs it in his work.
“It is a building block for the natural world,” he explains. “Understanding it helps with my realistic paintings.”
He works mostly from life, studying the human figure and selecting landscapes and subjects that move him. He enjoys painting from his imagination as well, and from poetry. Perhaps his best known painting is an interpretation of Lauren Antrosiglio’s poem “On Mill Avenue”, which was used as the cover for her book “This Glorious Oblivion”. An excerpt from the poem reads,
“This is the part of the desert
where peyote grows
The land of sacred visionaries
and resurrected martyrs
The night in my unconscious moves rapid
and then soft and deliberate
and I wake to incendiary day dreams
miscolored visions that pollute my mind,
It’s still early and I am following the bourbon
to the end of the bottle
gone and desperate jonesing for a good trip
or a stale cigarette
Silence penetrates the sting of the silver afternoon,
evening coming round
Somebody’s toilet’s clogged and I got nowhere to go
but downtown”
Schmissrauter is currently working on a 6x8-foot portrait honoring our local EMTs and firefighters. You can see more of his work on Facebook at “Schmissrauter Collection of Fine Art”. To commission a portrait, or to inquire about paintings, email him at rschmissrauter@gmail.com