Statement
Candy Decay is a visual language built on a single contradiction: everything sweet is already on its way out.
I paint small wooden panels in saturated, artificial colour — animals, desserts, bones, discarded objects — and finish them under resin, so the surface stays glossy while the subject rots. The humour is not a softening. It is how the harder thing gets said.
The work circles memory, appetite and impermanence without resolving them. A pigeon eats pizza at a candlelit table. A goldfish is frozen mid-swim inside a melting ice cube. These are not jokes about death, they are attempts to sit with it while the colour is still bright.
None of this is meant to read as hopeless. Candy Decay is also a way of celebrating things precisely because they don't last.
How My Visual Language Developed
Before Candy Decay had a name, it had a decade of unrelated-looking practice behind it — abstract painting, realistic painting, digital illustration, ballpoint pen studies, straightforward drawing. None of it was wasted. It just hadn't found a place to live yet.
- Early practice
Abstract & Colour Fields
Loose, spontaneous backgrounds and unplanned colour relationships. This is where the instinct for saturated, artificial colour and gestural mark-making comes from — it still builds the base of every panel.
- Alongside it
Ballpoint & Line
Years of ballpoint pen studies and drawing trained a separate habit: small, controlled, obsessive detail. The tiny line drawings, bones and symbols hidden in Candy Decay's backgrounds come directly from this.
- The longest stretch
Realistic Painting / Traditional Media
A long stretch of realistic painting, mostly in oil, mostly eyes. Getting a reflection or highlight right forces you to actually look — shadow, colour shift, depth, texture. Acrylic, watercolour and gouache came in alongside it. Not one style — learning to see, and what materials could do.
- In parallel
Digital Illustration
Digital work taught composition, graphic separation and how to let colour do the organising — flat shapes reading clearly against each other, even inside a crowded image.
- Now
Candy Decay
These stopped being separate styles and started sharing one surface: loose colour underneath, controlled line on top, observation from years of realistic painting, digital-trained composition holding it together. Not a narrower practice — what happens when the earlier ones stop working alone.
Nothing here is a rejection of the earlier work. Candy Decay is what all of it was pointing toward.
Candy Decay
Candy Decay is not a style applied to unrelated paintings. It is a world the works keep returning to, and each new panel extends it.
The same cast reappears — scavengers, pigeons, strawberries, skulls, cheap sweets, things somebody threw away. Placed together they stop reading as motifs and start reading as vocabulary: a set of terms for pleasure that does not last, and affection for what is already spoiling.
- neon pink
- turquoise
- acid green
- strawberries
- desserts
- animals
- pigeons
- bees
- bones
- skulls
- discarded objects
- handwritten fragments
- humour
- mortality
- comfort objects
Recognising Candy Decay
Across enough panels, recurring elements stop reading as decoration and start reading as vocabulary. A few examples:
On Time
In January 2026 I had a carotid artery dissection. It's the kind of thing that sounds more dramatic written down than it felt living through it, and I'd rather not turn it into a headline. What matters for the work is what came after: a much sharper, much less abstract sense that time runs out, for anyone, without asking permission first.
It didn't make me want to paint sadder pictures. If anything it clarified something Candy Decay was already circling — that a thing ending doesn't retroactively make it meaningless. Ordinary moments got harder to take for granted. Painting became one of the more reliable ways to sit with that, instead of just thinking about it.
How I See Detail
I'm neurodivergent, and it shows up directly in how the work gets made: a pull toward repetition, recurring symbols, dense detail, and building environments that only fully reveal themselves on a second or third look. Strong feelings need somewhere to go, and Candy Decay is largely that — a place built to hold intensity without needing to explain it away.
On Identity
I'm queer, and it's part of how I look at things rather than a separate subject I paint toward. It shows up as a general resistance to tidy categories — the instinct to let something be sweet and unsettling, cute and off, at the same time, instead of picking one.
Love and Other Loud Feelings
Love is in most of these paintings, along with grief, nostalgia, fear and a fair amount of absurdity. The bright colour isn't there to soften any of that — it's usually working against it, on purpose. A panel can be funny and sad, cute and unsettling, colourful and about mortality, all at once. I'm more interested in letting those sit together than in resolving them into one mood.
Inside My Studio
Everything happens in one small room: a desk, a wall of markers sorted by colour family, wood panels in various states of finished, and a lot of reference taped up wherever there's space. It isn't a tidy studio and it isn't trying to be — paint, offcuts and half-finished panels are part of how the work gets made, not something to clear away for a photo.
The current materials are acrylic paint, acrylic and alcohol markers, wood panels, and resin. The resin is doing real work: the glossy finish pushes the colour toward artificial and candy-like, while sealing the image permanently underneath it.
Selected works
Community
Over time, an online audience of around 11,000 people has formed around this work — and what matters isn't the number, it's what it turned into. People recognise recurring characters, trade theories about the symbols, and describe what a specific panel meant to them personally. Art stopped being something I only made in one direction. Sometimes what I can offer back is recognition, sometimes it's just permission to be a little strange in public.
What I Want This Work to Give
I want people to look closely enough to find the stupid joke hiding in the corner of a panel. I want someone to recognise a feeling they hadn't been able to name. I want the weird, the sensitive and the too-much to feel like they don't need hiding.
Candy Decay starts as something private. It only finishes once someone else brings their own memory to it — that handoff is most of the point.
About the artist
Paintranger is the artist name of Claudia Schmidt, a mixed-media artist based in Germany. Her ongoing series Candy Decay brings together cute-creepy characters, scavenging animals, junk food, bones and forgotten objects into densely built, saturated compositions on small wooden panels, sealed under resin.
Candy Decay grew out of a genuinely varied practice — abstract painting, realistic painting and drawing, ballpoint pen drawing, digital illustration — that stopped feeling like separate styles and started sharing one surface. She is neurodivergent and queer, both of which shape how closely and how insistently the work looks at detail, repetition and things that don't fit tidy categories. A carotid artery dissection in January 2026 sharpened an idea that was already central to the series: that something ending doesn't make it meaningless, and is sometimes exactly what makes it worth painting.
She works from a small home studio in acrylic, acrylic and alcohol marker, and resin, and shares the process with an online community of roughly 11,000 people who have become part of how the work gets read.
Selected information
Solo exhibitions
To be announced
Group exhibitions
- 21.11.2026 Melted Hey Drop Exhibition, Lüneburg
Upcoming
To be announced
Press and publications
To be announced
Selected collaborations
To be announced
Contact
PAINTRANGER
Artist inquiries / exhibitions / collaborations
Download as PDF