2000 US Consulate General,
Istanbul, TURKEY, Invitational Travel Grant
1983 Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation Grant
Randall Schmit (born 1955) is a contemporary American artist of
Luxembourger and first-generation
Dutch descent, working primarily in
painting.[2]
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.
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.
Randall Schmit at Apel Galeri, HOME/ART, Vol. 59, September 2000, p. 20.
Brill, Joseph A., Hudson Artists Bring American Culture to the Middle of the World, Register-Star, Sunday, September 3, 2000, Front Page & Living Today, pp 1–2.