ARTIST STATEMENT

MEET GEORGE | BIOGRAPHY | ARTIST STATEMENT | GALLERY REPRESENTATION

GEORGE PERROU'S ARTISTIC VISION stems from those elements of his childhood which are shared with many of his generation. His little-boy imagination was ignited by visions of space-race machinery, and with the new amorphous and other-worldly shapes that came with it and became popularized in the industrial design found in the everyday products in his home.

Drawn to those shapes and colors as envisioned by Calder, Miro and Kandinsky, Perrou has created his own style by imagining the mundane things he sees instead into his own colorful versions of reality. He then re-creates those visions onto the canvas because, he says, he “has no choice but to do so.” “I find painting my landscapes to be meditative, much like raking a Zen garden,” George explains, “Its like traveling to me, but like stepping into another world.”

Having completed his first works at the age of 34, George was finally able to satisfy with his paintings a strong urge to create something from nothing. After “listening to the whisper” calling him to his art, it took years and maturity for him to lessen the chatter of life enough to be able to hear it clearly, allowing him to respond. Perrou relays a lifetime of stories with eloquence onto the canvas, never having to fabricate of force one to tell.

His work’s appeal is as much about how it makes people feel as it is about how it looks to them. Perrou’s paintings are eccentric landscapes, which are amalgams of the real and surreal. Inspired by mid-century animation and painted with retro and modern colors, George’s art evokes reminiscence to the giddy, Saturday mornings of ‘a better time’ filled with the Hana-Barbera and Warner Bros. cartoons of our youth.

George paints his anthro-morphic landscapes and images with a flow-of-consciousness technique, drawing from things he sees and feels infused with a sub-conscience library of imagery compiled since childhood. He usually works two paintings concurrently, allowing inspiration to dictate the brushstrokes until partway through them, stepping back then to determine how then to best work the canvas with balance and structure.

“I never work from sketches,” says Perrou “I find working from sketches much like trying to nail Jello© to a wall. The image on the canvas morphs into what it is with little conscious direction from me…and I am often surprised at what it has become.”