Revered for her moving and surprisingly beautiful take on the scatological, AUREL SCHMIDT is one of today’s hottest young artists. Born in Kamloops, Canada, Aurel lives and works between Vancouver and New York City. Her passion for upsetting conventional ideas of art has evolved significantly beyond her attempts in high school to offend her art teacher. Now she’s armed with a self-taught intensive art history education and enviable hyper-realistic drawing abilities. Dutch still-life/landscapes and “all of the garbage, rats, and decayed stuff” on the streets of NYC inspire Aurel’s painstakingly detailed psychedelic compositions. For Issue 19’s Earth By, Aurel submitted an earlier work, titled The End. We first featured her in PLANET° in spring 2007.