James Perrin received his M.F.A. in painting from Boston University and his B.F.A. from Kansas City Art Institute. His paintings have been featured in solo and group exhibitions throughout the U.S., as well as in Venice, Italy. His work was recently included in Chaos and Awe: Painting for the 21st Century at the Frist Art Museum and Chrysler Museum of Art. A group of paintings is currently on view at the South Bend Museum of Art until 2021. In 2015, he received a Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant.

My work is comprised of several methods of painting, weaving together different ideas, frameworks, and strategies. I focus on the expressiveness and possibilities contained in the materials of paint and pictorial construction. My latest work integrates images and ideas derived from retail interiors, Caribbean beaches, fashion, CT scans, medical photographs, passages from paintings by Giotto, Masaccio, Enguerrand Quarton, and Fra Angelico, segments from my previous work, as well as photos from my daily life and travels.

I approach painting as a self-contained language system. I am interested in painting as a mode of communication that transverses time, cultures, and fixed languages - as a sensory-communicative experience between myself and the viewer.

Through the intimate formation of the physical surface of a painting, I explore the visual language and emotion that is embodied in a tactile image - an object created by hand, incorporating suggestions of depth and flatness, and various other pictorial elements originating from how we as human beings see and experience real space, objects, matter, life, and each other under the influence of time.