Biography
Visual artist Randall Schmit [1] was born in Newark, New Jersey, [2] and grew up along the Mississippi River in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. [3] After initial studies in architecture at Texas A&M University, Schmit began to paint, and was Studio Assistant to abstract colorist, Ray Parker (painter) during the late-seventies and early eighties in New York. [1] Schmit's calligraphic and buoyant abstractions first came to public attention in New York in the 1980s, where he exhibited extensively in the East Village, Manhattan. [1] His first solo exhibition in New York was held in 1982 at Betty Cuningham Gallery on Prince Street in Soho; later exhibitions of the artist's work were held in East Village venues such as José Freire's fiction/nonfiction (solo exhibition, 1987), the Pyramid Club (1986), and Virtual Garrison (1985). Schmit's paintings were characterised as "loud, cartoonish" by critic Michael Brenson during this period. [4] Recent solo exhibitions have been in Hudson, New York at the David Bruner Gallery (2010) and at McDaris Fine Art (2013), both on Warren Street; and a (2014) solo exhibition in Woodstock, NY, at the Woodstock Artists Association Museum (W.A.A.M.) on Tinker Street.
The artist has lived and worked in the Hudson Valley of New York since the early 2000s.
Influences
In addition to the obvious influences of Surrealism [5] and the mature New York School found in the studio of Schmit's mentor, [6] Ray Parker—a colleague of Abstract Expressionists Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Michael Goldberg and others—the graphic influence of comics and contemporary 1980s East Village Graffiti artists is also seen in Schmit's early work.
According to museum curator Lowery Stokes Sims, [7] Schmit has been "fascinated with cartoons, which have been a starting point in his early work, and has incorporated comic imagery into his work" since at least the early 1980s.
Whether from his childhood in Louisiana, [8] or the influence of Parker's musical interests, Schmit has long held an interest in jazz music, and was included in the important 1997 Smithsonian traveling exhibition, Seeing Jazz , alongside a quote from jazz composer, Miles Davis. [9] Drawing with graphite and acrylic paint over snipped images from art magazines, science fiction ephemera, movie and other books and magazines, Schmit has worked with collage since 1991. [10] During a visit to Istanbul, Turkey in 2000, [11] Schmit studied the historic mosaics installed within the ancient architecture there. [12] He exhibited an important group of collage paintings at Galerie Apel in Istanbul that year. These works are psychedelic in nature, with swirling comic and science fiction imagery [13] woven into web-like trails and gestures of paint that bind disparate images together as one entity.
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