Hi, I’m Joey.
I'm a painter and printmaker living in Atlanta. Thanks for being here.
Bio
Joey Schmidt is an artist based in Atlanta, GA. His practice circles the fragile negotiations between what he hides and reveals - the long, unfinished work of becoming legible to himself and to others. Working across painting, printmaking, and film photography, he makes layered surfaces that hold the people he loves through the things they left behind: objects, light, the space a body would fill. He hopes to be cool, persevering, and prudent. Hopes!
Schmidt is a 2016 graduate of the University of Louisville's Hite Art Institute, a 2011 alumnus of Kentucky's Governor's School for the Arts, and a 2025 Artist INC Fellow with Charlotte Street Foundation and Mid-America Arts Alliance. He operates his studio practice under the name Studio Buddy.
Find him on Instagram at @joeyyyschmidt and @studiooobuddy.
Artist Statement
My work begins with what gets left behind. Paintings, prints, and photographs built from the objects people I love have handled, the light that surrounded them, the space their body would fill. The feeling that outlasts the facts, the image that arrives already changed through distance and time.
Film photos taught me to trust distortion. The frame fixes a moment and corrupts it at the same time: double registration, two scenes occupying the same surface, none complete. In my experience, that's closer to how things actually are or perceived to be. The graphic planes interrupting my painted surfaces work the same way: flat fields of color, blown-out zones of light, shapes that cut across a scene. They are records of how perception fractures over time and trauma (physical, metaphysical), and of the slow reassembly pixelating a feeling of wholeness back together, trying to belong to a memory again.
I am still learning what it means to belong fully to my own life. I really want to be vulnerable. I hope this effort in realness helps the viewer feel more like themselves, too.