June 2026 saw the culmination of my two years studying on The Essential School of Painting Advanced Painting course. It has been a rigorous and demanding twenty four months. Along with 24/7 dedicated studio space the course included weekly seminars, regular one-to-one tutorials, group critiques, visiting artists and studio visits. It has ended with the graduation show that took place at the Art Pavilion in Mile End. A real delight to show my paintings alongside the fantastic work of my fellow students.
Big thanks to Alison Harper and Dan Coombs for the selections, curation and enthusiasm. Equally much appreciation to friends family who came along and supported.
Works Selected For The Show
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Travelling Light Reflected And Refracted
Catalogue Entry
This recent body of work explores the painterly puzzle of rendering reflections in
glass through the personal lens of self-portraiture albeit in a mysterious and
oblique manner. Alice like, the artist has become part of the unreal world of that
moment. In turn the viewer is in that self same position, invited into the painting
and subject to a returned gaze.
The focus was to explore the point of visual collision on a glass plane wherein the
outside and inside views are compressed and create a disorienting merged
perspective. Henry Perks is interested in the sandwich of reflection, surface and
what lies beneath or behind. He finds intriguing the specular illusion of the
location of objects. The car or tree is not inside the shop but, here they are.
The locations and subjects come directly from the artist’s life and derive from his
personal photographs. These commonplace scenes such as a wine bar on a busy
street or antique shop window were transformed and made strange by the play of
reflections.
Perks’ choices of locations are not incidental. One captures the window seat view
on a moving train, another an airport lounge. These are liminal, in-between places
experienced by many, caught mid journey. A conceptual echo perhaps of the
unsettled, impermanent nature of the reflective glass vista itself. A shift in
position or the passing of time, that particular illusion will evaporate.
The paintings invite you to explore that instance in a more leisurely way. As you
follow the lines of paint, details of reality and reflection, combine, emerge and
disappear. These ambiguous boundaries are intriguing, the complete picture is
not immediately apparent. This discrepancy provokes the viewer to explore the
painting further. The details within the image are puzzle pieces that combine to
reveal the different layers
Graphic Design ESOP Fables
I created the ESOP Fables graphics for the poster, catalogue, social media and postcarts.
