PERSON
Peter Schmidt
British painter (1931–1980) and <em>Eno's</em> co-creator of Oblique Strategies — whose studio practice and accumulated aphorisms, combined with Eno's, produced the deck that has become the canonical instrument for breaking creative deadlock.
Peter Schmidt was the British-German painter whose collaboration with Brian Eno produced Oblique Strategies in 1975 — the deck of cryptic instruction cards that has become the canonical instrument for breaking creative deadlock. Schmidt was also a teacher, a watercolorist, and a member of the experimental art community surrounding Eno at Winchester School of Art and in the London scene of the early 1970s. His own studio practice — patient, methodical, attentive to the specific resistances of his medium — provided half the material from which the Oblique Strategies deck was compiled. His premature death in 1980, at forty-nine, cut short a career whose influence persists primarily through the deck and secondarily through his paintings.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Schmidt was born in Berlin in 1931 and moved to England as a child. He studied at the Chelsea School of Art and taught at Watford School of Art, where his students included several figures who would become central to the British art-rock