Artist Statement and Biography of Nathan W. Perry

Artist Statement

My aim as an artist is to express my childhood and adult experiences which involve religion, nature, and the traumas caused by type 1 diabetes. All of my creations are my visual allegories. To depict these narratives as oil paintings, I employ multiples of aesthetics and painterly techniques that range from the Late Renaissance to contemporary 21st century. Through this synthesis of aesthetics, I attempt to address the modernist framework of the disassembly and rejection of classical art techniques and aesthetics by harmonizing them with classical frameworks; I believe that both the past and the present 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 conceptual painters of Modernity who had served me as intellectual injections, and selections of contemporary painters whose art both challenge, but not completely negate, the grounds of its historical past. The themes common to my art are experiences of the mystic, mythic, and dreams, and my reverence for nature and human anatomical beauty. The Baroque period of the 1700’s, the French Impressionists of the late 1800s, the modernists of the early and mid 20th century, and the Surrealist artists of the 20th century are frequently reflected in my art. Through this synthetic “marriage” of the past and present with the activities of my own psychic corpus, I attempt to embody and transmit myself through visual art with histoy, power, and meaning.

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.