Artist Profile: James Perkins
The emotional art of James Perkins
As an alumnus of both Yale and the School of Visual Arts, James Perkins is a proud New Yorker who seeks inspiration in the contrast between the manmade city he calls home and the sweeping and unpredictable paths of the natural world just beyond.
He counts the ocean and sunsets as his muses and the uninhibited elements of the outdoors are his materials; thus, through paint and sculpture, he experiments in entirely unique ways to tell the story of our planet’s history with stunning visual splendor. While many artists create only within the confines of their studios, Perkins finds that constraining, preferring instead to create using elements of nature. He defies the expected by using techniques like burying paintings in the sand to see what surprising patterns or color infusions await once they emerge.
Perkins’s work elicits the slow and steady pulse of life that lies beneath our surface-level hustle and bustle. While the world struggles en masse to disconnect from devices and the general hectic feelings of day-to-day life, his art seeks to find moments of peace and to remind viewers that simplicity and reflection are essential to achieving a life filled with true contentment.
Though he undoubtedly has the soul of an artist, an academic foundation of chemistry and experience in the business world lend his work a touch of logic and simplicity, too. The results mimic the beautiful stillness you can expect from a perfectly-formed mathematics solution: thrilling and boundary-pushing, yet simultaneously logical and scientific as straight and calculated lines collide with a shifting color palette and the grit of sand particles still clinging to the canvas.
Like James Perkins, we believe in a shared humanity, and his devotion to leading a life that uses the “ugliness in the world as motivation to seek beauty” is an inspiring ethos that deeply resonates with our hope for the future.
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