Visual artist Randall Schmit was born in Newark, New Jersey and grew up along the Mississippi River in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 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. 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.