Will Schmahl
Philadelphia, PENNSYLVANIA
The artwork I create reflects who I am— a balance of careful planning, spontaneous exploration, and a touch of messiness.
Message
My career has always lived at the intersection of creativity, storytelling, and building things from scratch. For more than 23 years, I worked in advertising, where I learned how ideas become brands, how emotion moves people, and how creative vision can shape the way we experience the world. That path eventually expanded into entrepreneurship and technology, where I became a founder in the travel-tech space, building products that bring people together through better connection, coordination, and shared experiences.
But my creative journey began long before my business career.
I first studied music at Moravian College, where I was surrounded by passionate art majors whose love for visual art sparked my own interest in painting. After leaving Moravian, I moved back to New York City to pursue dance at Marymount Manhattan College. A knee injury cut my dance career short, which led me into my first 9-to-5 job in advertising. Even as my professional life evolved through advertising, entrepreneurship, and technology, creativity remained the constant thread.
After many years away from painting, I found my way back to art during COVID, after losing my partner at the time. In the middle of grief, isolation, and a kind of pain that words could not fully hold, painting became my therapy. It gave me a place to put what I could not say. It became a way to process the loss of his life, to move through shock and sadness, and to create something physical from emotions that otherwise felt impossible to carry.
What began as a way to survive slowly became a way to heal. Painting helped me balance pain with expression, structure with chaos, and memory with movement. It continues to bring me grounding, curiosity, and joy every day.
My artistic style is still evolving, but it is rooted in bold experimentation. My work is riotously colorful and textured, often featuring drips, raw edges, layered surfaces, and unexpected material combinations. I am drawn to the tension between spontaneity and control: expressive movement against carefully rendered subjects, emotional messiness against intentional composition.
A spirit of exploration drives my approach to materials and mediums. I often incorporate unconventional or meaningful substances into my work, especially in commissioned pieces, allowing each painting to become more layered, personal, and multidimensional. For me, art is not only about what is seen on the surface. It is about memory, material, emotion, and story coming together in a way that feels alive.
Today, I create from my studio in Philadelphia’s Old City art district. Thank you for exploring my work. I hope it brings you the same sense of peace, expression, and inspiration that creating it continues to bring me.
Xoxo,
Will
Statement
I have always been drawn to the things that move people.
Technology, art, music, movement, design, storytelling, and human connection all share something powerful: they can change the way we feel, think, gather, heal, and understand one another. The things that interest me most are the things that shift humanity forward, whether through a product that solves a problem, a painting that creates stillness, or an experience that helps someone feel seen.
My work, both as an artist and a technology founder, is rooted in that same curiosity. I am inspired by the process of making sense of complexity — taking emotion, chaos, memory, friction, or an unsolved problem and turning it into something with form, clarity, beauty, and purpose.
Painting gives me a different kind of problem to solve. It allows me to step out of the noise, clear my head, and work through feeling in a physical way. It is therapy, but it is also joy. It is experimentation, release, discovery, and play. Through color, texture, movement, and material, I try to create work that carries both beauty and grace, even when it begins from something difficult.
For me, creativity is not separate from technology or business. It is the force behind all of it. It is how we imagine what does not exist yet, how we solve what feels stuck, and how we build things that move people forward.
That is what I am interested in: the ideas, objects, systems, and moments that help people feel more connected, more inspired, more human, and more alive.