About the Artist
date: 3/20/2025
Cara McElroy Schmidt, Wisconsin-based artist, is known for multi- media pieces that capture their subjects with a sense of softness and wistful nostalgia. The artist’s aesthetic choices are always hazy, but never lacking detail, as if pulling an image from a memory, or from a dream.
The artist enjoys working with soft pastels and colored pencil when making portraits, and with anything you could find in a scrapbook - lace, doilies, beads, buttons, fabric and patterned paper - when making her signature little critter displays.
The artist pulls from a number of inspirations for her work - Victorian practices, fairy tales, children’s illustrations, vintage toys, taxidermy, creature features, and gothic tales.