HARVEY SCHMIDT
Sports
Baseball
Football
A series of paintings on Pro Football that appeared in Esquire Magazine
Award of Merit from the New York Society of Illustrators
(Collection: Tom Ginsberg)
Today’s Inspiration March 21, 2014: Robert Benton, Schmidt's long-time friend and art director of Esquire magazine, offered the artist a football story to illustrate. Benton was expecting a sketch or perhaps a grease pencil and tempera painting... instead, Schmidt arrived at Benton's office with seven finished oil paintings. Additional space was made available and four of the seven ended up being published in conjunction with the article.
Schmidt said this about series work: "My goal is for the finished picture to stand alone as an individual painting but at the same time to complement the other paintings in the group. That type of reporting, with paintings on a single subject, has always been the kind of thing I like to do the most. It has much more appeal to me than doing isolated easel paintings."
"I also like the challenge of covering a subject that I myself did not select. There is no subject too big or too little, I believe, to be covered in this way."
Hockey
With his blonde hair flying and his skates slicing the ice, Bobby Hull of the Chicago Black Hawks was called “The Golden Jet” as one of the greatest hockey stars of all time. He won major sports awards during his career (1957-1980) and was immortalized by Harvey, who drew his action portrait for the November 14, 1960 cover of Sports Illustrated Magazine. Art renderings of sports action had been pioneered before 1954 by LeRoy Neiman, and this same general technique greatly suited the vigorous, gritty, realistic style that Harvey perfected and often used.
Regatta
Six young people in a boat, rowing and skimming along the surface of a river or lake in rhythmic surges: that’s a regatta! A sport of continuing popularity at many Northeast and Midwest universities, boat racing, like other racing, combines speed and strength with carefully synchronized teamwork over a measured distance. Sports Illustrated Magazine devoted a major feature about this sport in its June 1963 issue and sent Harvey to Syracuse University in upstate New York to portray their men’s crews. His color illustrations documented power, drama and action in a sport.
