Artist Statement and Biography of Nathan W. Perry

Artist Statement

My aim as an artist is to express my internal and external experiences, my imagination and ideality, and my states of being through oil paintings. The images that are derived from my internal corpus are my painted inner allegories. My process begins by addressing the framework of modernism, which, as a result of its growth in the 20th century, affected the art of the Western World's past to pave the way for the new at the expense of its aesthetics and techniques. I create art to attempt the re-validation and preservation of the rejected aesthetics and techniques of the past by synthesizing them with contemporary visual styles and color palettes. I believe that the present lives because it cooperates with its living past; both are valid.

My preferred medium is oil paint on canvas. This represents for me a connection with the past masters whose techniques I had revered and studied, the modernist painters of the 20th century who had served me as intellectual injections, and selections of the painters of the new millennium whose art both challenges, but seem not to negate, the grounds of its historical past. The themes common to my art are experiences of the mystic and mythic, dreams and nightmares, and my reverence for nature and human anatomical beauty. My work is a synthetic "marriage" of these past and present aesthetics and techniques and the activities of my own psychic corpus. I attempt to embody and transmit myself through art with power, meaning, and history.

Artist Biography

Nathan Perry was born in the state of Connecticut, America, and educated in the fine arts at the Rhode Island School of Design. Relevant to his experiences as an artist were his exposure to wildlife and nature through his mother, who is a wildlife rehabilitist, and his exposure to culture and academia through his father, who is a scholar and an educator. Both parents strongly advocate art and education.

Among Nathan's personal history, which serves as his education and inspiration, were his visitations to the museums of America and Europe, where he experienced canonical art from the Renaissance through the contemporary. Experiencing these bodies of art informed him beyond the limits of written art history, relevant to ideas of the religious and metaphysical, mythological, and monumental.

Other experiences included visitations to the gardens of Jean Claude Monet in Giverny France, where the grounds of the Impressionist movement had emerged and made possible the movements of modern art. Other experiences include Rome Italy, Paris France, and Barcelona Spain, among other localities, where its antiquities exist with fortitude against the powers of time. These insights offer Nathan the expressions of timelessness and history, ideals that are expressed in Nathan's art.

Nathan currently lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he practices as an artist, pursuing his self-education and experiencing the lessons of life and the world, the greatest teachers of all. He chooses to live life as authentically as possible.