"Schmidt's still lifes fit within the tradition of still life painting's restful love of objects, in contained spaces, that satisfy both the artist's and the viewer's need for stable, ordered compositions. In his work, there is a celebration of the pleasures of the simplest things, from a loaf of bread to cloves of garlic. Essential to his work is the seen or unseen container, first and foremost the table and then its subsets of bags, boxes, nets and jars and their relationship to the edge of the canvas, itself an object and a container."
- Ann Sargent Wooster