![\"Dickson](\"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Dickson-7.jpg\")
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His family was always going to go back home. Home being Seguin, Texas, where Dickson Schneider moved from when he was four years old, to go with his family to live in California. Dickson Schneider would eventually, however, set down roots in California, in the Bay Area, graduating from Alameda High School and going on to get his bachelor\u2019s degree from California State Hayward, where he now teaches. The artist would also go on to get a graduate degree from Washington State University, where his graduate show was a 15-foot-long screen consisting of two paper screens and a block of painted wood. Says the artist, \u201cMy goal at the time was to make something beautiful.\u201d<\/p>\n
In fact, the theme of making something beautiful and his interrogation of what is beautiful, in tandem with his pointed critique of the art world, has been an ongoing preoccupation. The artist has become well known for his idealized paintings of women, except that, upon closer examination, it is easy to see these women aren\u2019t much idealized at all, and what the artist is seeking to demonstrate in these works is that the concept of idealized feminine beauty itself is quite distorted. \u201cThese paintings all came about because a student of mine did a painting of his girlfriend that was all wrong. It was so wrong, this painting, that people could not stop laughing at it. But what I started to notice was that people also could not stop looking at this painting. For me, the painting became a moment of wrong beauty, and I became intrigued by this and started doing this kind of work. What I was going for was a dissonance between what one was seeing and what one thought they were seeing. For me, these paintings and the idea behind the work were an implicit critique of the art world.\u201d<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n Another preoccupation in Schneider\u2019s work is strong Asian influences. The artist explains these influences by harking back to a past relationship. \u201cGrowing up,\u201d he explains, \u201cmy best friend was Chinese and I started very early as an artist to look to the East for inspiration. Interestingly enough though, my first love was and is Japanese art and not Chinese art. For a while I did a lot of work utilizing Shoji screens, and these days I am working with a Japanese manga character named Naruto.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n