Biography
. DEBORAH PERRY ON HER LIFE, STYLE, AND METHOD
At five years old I was following my daddy around carrying tools and lumber, taking measurements of everything in sight, watching him build with saws and hammers fine homes in the Roebuck, Vestavia, Hoover, and eventually Inverness areas of Birmingham, Alabama. He thought big and accomplished his dreams. I took after him in terms of imagining big projects, like an entire series of drawings and paintings--big ones not little ones, a series that filled two or more large rooms in our house. Besides the early influence of my father, the flowers in my mother’s gardens taught me to love beautiful colors and shapes. I could sit for hours drawing the different shapes, while listening to classical and rock and roll music. My older sister, to this very day inspires me, piecing together gorgeous quilts and making pottery. While at home together, we had many projects going using our hands, from stained-glass tables to collage drawings all over the floors. Comparing and contrasting our different methods of working made us early critics.
In Birmingham, on Southside between Highland Avenue and Clairmont was where I lived for much of my life. I would take my dogs to Oak Mountain Park where we found love for natural beauty, sketching the waterfall, rocks, and lake. From then till now I continue to sketch from rocky mountains, swift rivers, lakes, and fiery fields, and enjoy the beauty and motion in scenes, especially the meteoric, eruptive, explosive, and volcanic. Many of my drawings, etchings, woodcuts, and lithographs have derived from watching and capturing the motion and details of wild animals at the Birmingham Zoo, lions and tigers, birds and deer, bears and big-horn sheep. When attending the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, a very special outing for me was drawing a pasture full of horses.
To this very day, I immerse myself in natural tints of color that are intuitively brushed on to my abstract canvas. I push the paint to the extreme, using thin washes of color, gradually building up to thicker and thicker impasto, layer after layer to suggest the roundness and motion of forms and textures. From the many different tools and brushes, the paint falls and flies in all directions, some controlled and others fortuitous. Sometimes imagining the high waves of oceans and rhythmic movement of the Warrior or Coosa River in Alabama, I use many scrapers to apply the paint, from one stage of development to the next. Sometimes I allow the paint to dry before the next stage, but more often I am painting wet on wet. Stepping back and forth in a kind of ritual-like dance from one painting to the next rather than to just one painting, using complementary and contrasting colors, shapes, and textures, I have executed a series of paintings that are interrelated emotionally and spiritually.
I admire the directness and immediacy of expression expounded by the “Action Painters,” and other artists such as Diebenkorn, Motherwell, Gorky, de Kooning, Kline, or Guston. As a Colorist I admire and extract the inner essence of forms and allow color to structure them. Abstract emotional shapes from my imagination suggest forms in nature, but the tension of color relations, in turn, evoke the memory of an emotion. In the painting, changes in coloration, natural light, movement, and patterns of growth have come to symbolize my feelings, thoughts, or responses to mysterious events of our times and my spiritual destiny for adventure, experiment, and knowledge.
I was born in a log cabin built by my father in Guin, Marion County, Alabama. I have earned The Richard C. Zoellner Printmaking Award, and other scholarships and teaching stipends, and Master of Fine Arts degree from The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa in painting, printmaking and art history. I have also attended and earned degrees from other colleges, Jacksonville State University, University of Alabama in Birmingham and Howard University in Washington, D.C. I have had reviews and exhibitions at Ariel Gallery at Soho, New York City, NY; Solo exhibitions at The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Mississippi State University for Women, and Aaron Art Gallery in Washington, D.C. I am now teaching at Gadsden State Community College. At Meadows Library there, I have had two Solo exhibitions. I have also presented paintings in the 2009 Annual Juried Show at the Gadsden Museum of Art.
At five years old I was following my daddy around carrying tools and lumber, taking measurements of everything in sight, watching him build with saws and hammers fine homes in the Roebuck, Vestavia, Hoover, and eventually Inverness areas of Birmingham, Alabama. He thought big and accomplished his dreams. I took after him in terms of imagining big projects, like an entire series of drawings and paintings--big ones not little ones, a series that filled two or more large rooms in our house. Besides the early influence of my father, the flowers in my mother’s gardens taught me to love beautiful colors and shapes. I could sit for hours drawing the different shapes, while listening to classical and rock and roll music. My older sister, to this very day inspires me, piecing together gorgeous quilts and making pottery. While at home together, we had many projects going using our hands, from stained-glass tables to collage drawings all over the floors. Comparing and contrasting our different methods of working made us early critics.
In Birmingham, on Southside between Highland Avenue and Clairmont was where I lived for much of my life. I would take my dogs to Oak Mountain Park where we found love for natural beauty, sketching the waterfall, rocks, and lake. From then till now I continue to sketch from rocky mountains, swift rivers, lakes, and fiery fields, and enjoy the beauty and motion in scenes, especially the meteoric, eruptive, explosive, and volcanic. Many of my drawings, etchings, woodcuts, and lithographs have derived from watching and capturing the motion and details of wild animals at the Birmingham Zoo, lions and tigers, birds and deer, bears and big-horn sheep. When attending the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, a very special outing for me was drawing a pasture full of horses.
To this very day, I immerse myself in natural tints of color that are intuitively brushed on to my abstract canvas. I push the paint to the extreme, using thin washes of color, gradually building up to thicker and thicker impasto, layer after layer to suggest the roundness and motion of forms and textures. From the many different tools and brushes, the paint falls and flies in all directions, some controlled and others fortuitous. Sometimes imagining the high waves of oceans and rhythmic movement of the Warrior or Coosa River in Alabama, I use many scrapers to apply the paint, from one stage of development to the next. Sometimes I allow the paint to dry before the next stage, but more often I am painting wet on wet. Stepping back and forth in a kind of ritual-like dance from one painting to the next rather than to just one painting, using complementary and contrasting colors, shapes, and textures, I have executed a series of paintings that are interrelated emotionally and spiritually.
I admire the directness and immediacy of expression expounded by the “Action Painters,” and other artists such as Diebenkorn, Motherwell, Gorky, de Kooning, Kline, or Guston. As a Colorist I admire and extract the inner essence of forms and allow color to structure them. Abstract emotional shapes from my imagination suggest forms in nature, but the tension of color relations, in turn, evoke the memory of an emotion. In the painting, changes in coloration, natural light, movement, and patterns of growth have come to symbolize my feelings, thoughts, or responses to mysterious events of our times and my spiritual destiny for adventure, experiment, and knowledge.
I was born in a log cabin built by my father in Guin, Marion County, Alabama. I have earned The Richard C. Zoellner Printmaking Award, and other scholarships and teaching stipends, and Master of Fine Arts degree from The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa in painting, printmaking and art history. I have also attended and earned degrees from other colleges, Jacksonville State University, University of Alabama in Birmingham and Howard University in Washington, D.C. I have had reviews and exhibitions at Ariel Gallery at Soho, New York City, NY; Solo exhibitions at The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Mississippi State University for Women, and Aaron Art Gallery in Washington, D.C. I am now teaching at Gadsden State Community College. At Meadows Library there, I have had two Solo exhibitions. I have also presented paintings in the 2009 Annual Juried Show at the Gadsden Museum of Art.
