A striking Eye for Art

Charlie Schmidt has taken on many identities over his long career in Spokane – graphics designer, video producer, rock drummer and all-around creative character. He’s known in cities such as Paris, Tokyo and Buenos Aires as something even wackier: The Man With the Dancing Nose. (We’ll explain that later).

This month, however, Schmidt is finally being recognized for the one thing that matters most to him: being an artist.

After an intense year of painting and drawing, he opened his first full-fledged art exhibit, “Charlie Schmidt, Performance Art Test Pilot,” now at the Lorinda Knight Gallery. This long-delayed flight back to his artistic roots is not only the show’s impetus, it’s the show’s theme.

“A test pilot is willing to take chances,” said Schmidt, 56, who donned a flight suit and simulated a blast-off during the show’s opening on Oct. 5. “It’s pretty hard to be willing to step into that plane and take the test flight into your own heart.”

Test flights can certainly be risky, especially when the flight components include a painting of a giant Dots candy package; an entire travel trailer cut in half; and music performed by the artist himself and his 9-year-old daughter, Sydney.

“I don’t know what to expect out of this,” he admitted the morning of the opening.

The show also has another, very Charlie-like, theme: Embracing your inner radish.

Radish?

“The radish seed knows how to become a crisp, bright, beautiful radish,” said Schmidt, brandishing a seed packet. “It knows it without going to college, without going to church, without seeing a counselor, without medication. It just knows how. The question is: What do you just know? What do I just know?”

If being a radish is in the radish’s DNA, being a painter is in Schmidt’s DNA. It just took him about 35 years to remember that.

The realization first hit when he was teaching art at his daughter’s school and he told the kids: “Be yourself.”

Every time he said it, he felt like a hypocrite.

“My three rules that I tell everybody are: No. 1, dream full blast, every day. No. 2, work full blast on that dream, even just a little. No. 3, survive gracefully in the meantime. If you do those three lessons just a little bit, every day, even for 30 seconds, it matters. It’s like putting oil on the axle.”

Yet he wasn’t following those rules for himself. As the owner of his own firm, City Graphics, he was so busy working on ads and graphics for his commercial clients that he never did any work toward his own dream.

“It got so my painting studio was like a hood ornament on a hot rod you never drive,” said Charlie. “There were brushes and it was a big mess and it looked like I was painting all the time. But I wasn’t painting for years.”

Since at least the early 1970s, when he studied art at Washington State University and at a Tokyo art school, he considered himself, first and foremost, a painter. Yet when he graduated, he discovered that the only “art” jobs available were for graphics arts.

“I thought art, graphic arts, what’s the difference?” said Charlie.

He landed a graphic arts job at KREM-2. He had to stuff his hair under a wig the first two weeks to mask the fact that he had “hair down to my butt.” He ended up staying for two years. When he left, he began doing freelance work for various commercial clients. Eventually, this evolved into his own lucrative firm.

About year ago, he realized that he was devoting all of his creative energies to his clients. One particular client – himself – was being ignored.

“So I just went upstairs and started painting,” he said. “I went and bought a bunch of canvases. I went and signed a check at the art supply for $1,000 and brought it all home. That was one way I made sure I did it – I owed it to myself to work on it.”

The result, for Schmidt, was exhilarating. He found himself picking up right where he left off, more than three decades ago.

“It almost perfectly lined up, even to content, technique, color, and even objects,” said Schmidt. “For this show, I found myself in the garage, looking for things that I put in a box in the 1970s.”

Even his obsessions are the same. Those include trailers, hot rods, and Warholesque pop culture references. With its test pilot imagery and bright acrylic colors, the show reflects Charlie’s sense of humor. In one self-portrait, “B-58 Dream,” the artist wears a bomber on his head like a hat.

Yet the show has a serious core. The test pilot theme also refers to humanity’s endless search for meaning.

“Everybody has a paradigm,” said Schmidt. “There are the Catholics and the Buddhists and the born-again guys and the bikers and neo-Nazis, all of these groups who say, ‘We’ve got it figured out.’ Yet when I analyze this stuff, when I’m critical in my thinking, it doesn’t mean much to me. The idea of one paradigm fitting everybody is ludicrous.”

He grew up Catholic in Spokane, attending St. Ann’s and Gonzaga Prep, with “plenty of confession and communion.” Yet he has come to the conclusion that real peace comes from looking within for the “real you.”

Or, to put it another way, by letting the radish seed inside become a radish.

These are deep thoughts coming for a man who is known for performing on a toy drum set with his band, Fondue. Not to mention from a man who is internationally famous for nose-dancing.

“Actually, I call it Paranormal Face Control,” said Schmidt.

It may look paranormal, but it consists of Schmidt holding a sheet of clear Plexiglas against his face and making his nose move back and forth. When filmed in close-up, his prodigious schnoz seems to be gyrating in rhythm to music. He invented it years ago, from the same creative impulses which animate his art.

“We had things in the room – a camera, a tape playing the theme from ‘Love Boat,’ and a piece of Plexiglas,” he said. “It was totally automatic, totally natural. I was just listening to the inside.”

Paranormal Face Control has taken Schmidt to TV appearances in Paris, Rome, England, Germany and all over Europe. His nose has danced on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” – twice. He recently won first place on a Japanese show called “The Grand Prix of Strange Faces.” Now, if you search “Charlie Schmidt” on YouTube, you’ll see his Grand Prix-winning face-dance.

“Getting noticed from Spokane is a long shot,” said Schmidt. “I wasn’t trying to do that. Not trying is important.”

But if you want to see the complete Charlie, you need to look beyond his nose. You need to see, at long last, the paint he applies to canvas.