Guitars Are a Canvas for Lamorinda Music Teacher

Lafayette musician and teacher Paul Schmidt has created a hybrid generation of one-of-a-kind, high-end guitars you won't see thudding into an amplifier any time soon.

Working with Los Angeles luthier Michael Spalt, he sought to take the naturalistic forms of the Art Nouveau period and blend them with individually crafted "axes," branding the result "The Nouveau Series" and making them available to collectors and hardcore musicians around the world.

"You take the art, and the art theme drives creation of the rest of the instrument," Schmidt says.

The idea to design and build guitars incorporating the best of 19th Century ideaology came to Schmidt in the 1980s when he saw a Resin Top guitar made by Steven Klein in Los Angeles. While co-curating an exhibit at the Sonoma Valley Museum of art in the 1990s, he saw one of Spalt's "art" guitars and he set out to blend the body styles of Klein's guitars with Spalt's artwork.

After a few years of planning "The Nouveau Series" was born and in 2000, with funding from Walnut Creek resident and music student Mike Welden, the project got underway.

"I assembled all the art I had collected over a number of years," Schmidt said. "Michael put them all together using similar technology to his other resin-top guitars and, with a couple of adjustments on how he did the bridge and how he did the neck, off we went."

Their first guitar, "Tiffany Prototype," was completed in 2005.  To date, there are 14 in the series – bearing names like "Pissarro in the Field," or "L'Image Profile" – and one has already been sold to a collector for the the price of a compact car.

Spalt says working on the series was one of the toughest things he's ever done.

"Over the years, as I was working on them, they forced me to expand my craft and they offered a larger and more sophisticated canvas for my work," he said.  "Making 14 individual guitars work as a series with a unified theme was a challenge in itself."

That challenge, he says, forged a bond between the two men who – despite the distance between them – became great friends.

"Paul's passion for the project and his persistence in the face of some really tough times were crucial elements in the creation and finally completion of the series," Spalt explained.

Welden is currently working on getting the guitars to exhibits around the country. They are scheduled to be shown at the National Association of Music Manufacturer's "Making Music Museum" in Carlsbad from October through January, and possibly to the Boston Museum of Art early next year.

For more information on the guitars, visit Schmidt's website.