Portrait of an Artist as a Grown Man
 Morgan McGivern |
(4/16/2008) Growing up one of six children, in a Catholic family in 1970s Providence, R.I., Mark Perry was praised by his third-grade teacher for having an uncanny ability to copy Christmas trees and turkeys for holiday decorations.
“I felt like I was a monkey,” Mr. Perry said last month. “But I realized I could do it, and I loved doing it, and got praise for my work.”
At 48, Mr. Perry, who is slim, with attentive blue eyes, is finally hitting his stride as a painter. After working for more than 20 years as a commercial artist and a masseur, among other far-flung professions, he is about to celebrate his first solo gallery show, “Interlude,” which opens at the Surface Library gallery in Springs on Saturday.
“It’s been a long time coming,” Mr. Perry said. “But the timing feels right, and the work feels fluid and worth showing.”
Mr. Perry lives and works part time in a sleek, modern house overlooking Three Mile Harbor. It sits on an elevation above the tree line surrounded by a deck whose view is unimpeded by neighboring houses: nothing but leaves and water as far as the eye can see.
The artist paints dynamic contemporary visions of nature from photographs that he has taken on the East End and on his travels around the world. Large compositions are often bisected into grids of smaller paintings that can be hung together or separately.
Delicate, clear colors, and confident brushwork meld traditional scenes of dunes, grasses, trees, and blossoms with a fantastical quality evocative of nature by way of theatrical sets and fairy tales. Mr. Perry skillfully avoids decorative superficiality, through inventive perspective, scale, and subtle graphic qualities not traditionally emphasized in landscape painting.
He works quickly, and he prefers to complete a painting, filled with his signature rhythmic patterning of color and shape, in a single concentrated burst of energy.
“With age and skill, I think more about the finished painting from the beginning,” he said.
 A detail from a nine-panel series of summer clover by Mark Perry |
“I sketch with pencil directly onto the canvas, and then begin to build up layers of washes of paint. I didn’t always paint that way. I didn’t have the formal training as a painter, and I would work from the front, with dark layers. It took me a while to realize the skills of building up lighter colors to make a cleaner painting.”
The artist’s recent series have included mangrove trees from Florida, vast stands of defoliated birches from the wilderness surrounding the Grand Canyon, and palms from near Joshua Tree in the California desert, as well as dunes, grasses, and fields of clover from the East End. Noticeably absent are figures and narrative themes.
Mr. Perry’s childhood ability to draw friendly turkeys, cheerful elves, and jolly Santas flourished despite a grammar school curriculum that didn’t include art classes. At 14, he decided to break with his family’s tradition of parochial education and go to Hope High School, an experimental program for gifted students created by the State of Rhode Island and the Rhode Island School of Design.
“I bused across town,” Mr. Perry said. “Academically I was sufficient, but I did really well in weaving, ceramics, and I had some great teachers,” including Chris Van Allsburg, the author and illustrator best known for “The Polar Express,” and Myrna Lamb, an artist who is now a popular psychic radio host in Providence as well as a columnist and author.
“Her method was very instructive,” Mr. Perry said of Ms. Lamb. “She taught us to draw with a ballpoint pen. You get such little results, and can’t build it up.”
Ms. Lamb said that the program had great energy and produced impressive work from them. “Mark,” she said, “had a wonderful blend of intensity and innocence . . . a combination that made him easy to reach, receptive, and enthusiastic.”
The Hope High School program encouraged students to participate in all the creative arts. Mr. Perry, a self-described introvert, found that he loved musical theater and dancing. “It was a great, safe environment,” he said.
The experimental school closed shortly after Mr. Perry graduated in the late 1970s, but the confidence that he had developed in his ability to draw led to a job with an engineering firm. For 10 years he worked drafting electrical engineering diagrams. Perspective, and a keen eye for intricate detail, are the bread-and-butter skills of all professional draftsman.
Every architectural drawing integrates the horizon, eye-level information for instructional purposes, and a vanishing point, where all the parallel lines intersect. Mr. Perry developed a facility for technical rendering that was unusual at the time except in arts programs behind the Iron Curtain in former Soviet bloc countries.
In 1989, Mr. Perry moved to New York City. He found work as a textile colorist and designer in the garment district, which added speed to his arsenal of skills.
“I learned to paint there,” Mr. Perry said. “I learned simple patterning. The experience made my technique fluid. A supervisor at one of the studios would always say to me, ‘No, Mark! One line! Slow down!’ I learned to concentrate.”
Despite a career drawing and designing, Mr. Perry never abandoned his ambition to become a painter. Many days, after churning out endless varieties of swimsuit fabric designs, he would trudge across town to the Society of Illustrators, near Bloomingdale’s, or to the Spring Street Studio in SoHo, for studio instruction.
“My paintings were more gestural,” Mr. Perry said of his work at the time. “I also did figurative work, landscapes, and cityscapes, but it wasn’t a cohesive body of work. I felt like a weekend painter. It was really hard. People from the office would take work home at night to earn extra money, and I was so burned out. I just couldn’t do it.”
In the late 1990s Mr. Perry decided to abandon the grueling repetition of the textile design environment, and enroll in training to become a Shiatsu masseur.
To support himself he cleaned apartments. “It was really hard work,” he said. “But I always felt strongly that I had what it takes to be an artist, and that I could do it. I just realized that I needed to think in more commercial terms.”
A few years ago Mr. Perry discovered the work of a group of German painters, trained during the Communist era, known as the Leipzig painters. The painters, all men, work in a wide range of styles, but they share a technical proficiency honed under the auspices of an academic art system that discouraged political and visionary narrative subjects.
In an article in The New York Times, Robert Storr, a professor at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, said that the Leipzig painters are “going back to a literal, descriptive figuration and giving it an air of anomie.” Mr. Perry said he particularly admires paintings by Matthias Weischer and David Schnell.
They, like Mr. Perry, depict ordinary interiors, and landscapes, manipulated into complex patterns and colors, bearing faint vestiges of human habitation.
In 2006 Mr. Perry met his partner, John McGovern, who encouraged him to devote his full attention to painting. “It was late fall,” Mr. Perry said. “I sat on the deck and realized that I wanted to be a studio painter, and it was still possible.”
The paintings, which can be seen at the Surface Library through April 27, distill a lifetime of practice, and natural talent, into the first chapter of a painter’s bright new career.
“I’ve never been so focused,” Mr. Perry said. “I’m fortunate that my life allowed me that.”
“Interlude” will open at the Surface Library with a reception on Saturday from 6 to 9 p.m.