John Justin Schmidtberger was born in New York City and grew up in Hackettstown, NJ, the son of two professors of literature, in a large family with five siblings. After one year in the local high school, John and his older brother won scholarships to the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.


There, along with rigorous academics, he was able to take studio art classes with practicing artists, including figure drawing, sculpture, and film-making. In his senior year, he won the Germain Glidden Prize for Excellence in Art, as well as the Spanish Prize.


In 1979 he started at the University of Pennsylvania, with the intent to study medicine, but he soon changed to fine arts.


He studied painting, drawing, printmaking and sculpture with painter Neil Welliver, sculptor Robert Engman, and printmaker Hitoshi Nakazato, earning a Bachelors Degree in 1984 and a Masters of Fine Arts Degree in 1987. Critics who participated in the program included painters Alex Katz, Adele Alsop, and Susan Shatter; painter/photographer/filmmaker Rudy Burkhardt, and poet John Ashbery. At the time, Penn’s graduate program also featured a residency at the Gutman Center near New Hope, a converted farm established for artists and architects interested in landscape.

John lived there for two years, and after graduation settled nearby with fellow art student, then wife, Corinne Lalin. They had two children, Rebecca and Aidan. In 1994 they moved further up-river to Upper Black Eddy, PA, a historic village on the Delaware, where they live today.

At the urging of Neil Welliver, and friends from Maine, John and his family began to spend summers in Northport, Maine, where the clear, hard light and rugged landscape make for a painter’s paradise.


John works plein-air style, but his vision leans more to the poetic than the literal. He says” I search for places and situations that are so compelling I feel the need to paint like a physical sensation. Then I paint or draw as simply and directly as possible. I'm not interested in the details at all. I ask myself--what is the gesture? What is the mood? What is the light doing? How can I make every color and brushstroke count, each inch of the canvas matter?”


John’s work has been exhibited at the James A. Michener Museum, Doylestown, PA; The Prince Street Gallery, New York, NY; Elan Fine Arts, Rockland, ME, and many others. His work was reviewed in the New York Times, and has appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine. John’s work is represented in numerous private and public collections, including the personal collection of Charles Cawley, former CEO of MBNA Corporation and Kate White, author and editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan Magazine. more....