Mary Perkins
The Misbehavers

Mary Perkins is a young artist who creates candid surrealistic scenes that speak to the inner child. Finely attuned to the ebb and flow of her mood, she renders only what she truly feels. Her characters are touching and often naïve, but only on the surface: on closer and more thoughtful contemplation, they leave the viewer asking all kinds of questions.

Why does the pink-clad girl conceal in her bosom a little devil – no matter how cute? What has happened in the room in which severed doll heads bleed bubble gum? Who is leading by the nose the boy in pink sunglasses? What’s on the mind of the little misbehavers who stand frowning, away from their playing peers?

The artist starts out by sketching the central imagery and goes on to elaborate the backstories of the main protagonists, placing them in a certain spot within the imaginary worlds populated by supporting characters. All these personae are dreamy and ostensibly somewhat detached. However, their creator insists that they ‘project calmness and at times melancholy, but not sadness.’ None of them smiles or laughs, but no one cries either: the drops that one invariably spots on their cheeks are ‘not tears, but a certain substance solidified like wax and indicating that time stands still in the picture.’

In her artistic practice, Mary Perkins utilises various new media, neither limiting herself to nor being dismissive of the academic painting tradition, and thus fully deserves to be labelled a multidisciplinary artist. ‘The defining feature of my painting style is the constant oscillation between the opposites in an attempt to transform the finite into the infinite,’ explains Mary.

In the fairy-tale world evoked by Mary Perkins the distinction between reality and fantasy is blurred. Most of her works allude to escapism – one of the most contentious issues of our times. As mankind progresses, we are faced with an ever increasing number of means to escape reality, and in our digital era their profusion becomes a real challenge. The so-called ‘new sincerity’ offers us one of the possible ways of leaving behind the irony and cynicism of postmodernism.