There is a relationship between form and proportion and the human body that holds many visual biases in art. I work to have my viewers encounter this by alleviating myself from the perfect proportional standards one would assume would be in a figurative painting. I do this by representing the various modes and interpretations that can come from the observation of bodily traits. By exhibiting multiple means of indicating this I use it for both logical composition and intuitive process.
To me the most influential paintings are the ones where the use of technique is not only metaphoric towards culture based ideas, but also formal to where the artist sees it as a space to further push the physical extremes of their work. This is because it pulls many inspirations from the outside world as well as critically looking at the medium at hand. I react to this by painting fast, loose, but still concise to give my work an invigorating surface. The illustrative power of this approach is to display people having their internal structure in a state of chaos yet still psychologically stable.
In order to give myself a venue to demonstrate all of these ideas I choose mundane yet seemingly absurd narratives that aren’t immediately recognizable. My reason for doing this is to combat the continuous trend in figuration to place people in understandable and routine scenarios. In what may seem as random moments my individuals are placed in, I use it as a strategy to engage my viewer in a place of critical thinking containing paint, human beings, and situations.
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Nicholas Perry is an artist based in Milwaukee Wisconsin. He attends the Peck School of the Arts at UW-Milwaukee. His paintings illustrate the various representational questions and issues of depicting the human form in history. His work has been exhibited at various Wisconsin based galleries such as the Rabbit Gallery, Young space, and the Union Art Gallery. His work has also been published by various university publications such as Timber, Glass Mountain, Tenemos, 30 North, and many more.
