Dan Perkins’ geometric art seems digital at first, but look closer. His creations are actually painstakingly painted on canvas, using oil paints. Colorful, graphic, but minimal, his work reminds of an Escher illustration – a sort of optical illusion that plays tricks on your mind.
“Color has always been a constant source of inspiration, as well as the unique space of a painting, as something that is flat, but has depth,” says the Brooklyn-based artist in an interview with Art of Choice. “That essential paradox has always been a great source of inspiration,” he says. “For me, the sublime and its shifting cultural definition has been a theme in my work, tangentially or directly, for many years. I often think of my current work as attempting to describe impossible sublime forms. Forms that seduce and reward; hopefully inviting the viewer to linger long enough to slowly tease out their logic.”
“Initially, I was working away from representation, taking images and source material and cropping them oddly, or slicing them into patterns,” he said, talking about his creative evolution. “Working through this process, I found that I was more interested in optical shape play than necessarily questioning the image. I also found a more personal voice in abstraction that was less burdened by theory. And so from there the paintings began to slowly evolve away from the image and towards abstraction.”
“By and large the images describe the natural world in some sense. Increasingly, I’ve been investigating color and light at night, nocturnes in a sense,” he says. Take a look at his exploration of shapes and colors:
