Norman Perryman was born in Birmingham, England in 1933, was educated at the Worcester Royal Grammar School, and studied painting and art education at the Birmingham College of Art and Crafts, graduating with Honours in 1954. He emigrated to the Netherlands in 1957, then moved to Switzerland (Leysin 1966, Villars 1973 and Geneva 1975-77). He was Head of Art at Aiglon College (1967–73) and from 1976–1990 was Chief Examiner for the Visual Arts programme of the International Baccalaureate, designing and developing the Visual Art curriculum and traveling worldwide to give workshops on the role of the arts in education and the relationships of the visual arts and music. He returned to Holland in 1978 and now lives in Amsterdam.
Perryman has exhibited widely (in The Netherlands, U.K., Switzerland, Germany and the U.S.). His principal themes are portraits, landscapes, dance and in particular, music. He uses the fluid transparency of watercolour to convey the illusion of movement and the transient nature of music and dance. His work is both figurative and abstract expressionist. Perryman’s earliest paintings on musical themes stem from the early sixties. One of his first subjects was conductor Bernard Haitink in 1965, conducting the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam. This led to many 'action portraits' of other great musicians, such as the violinist Lord Yehudi Menuhin.
In 1990, Perryman was commissioned to paint a series of large watercolours of musical celebrities for Symphony Hall, Birmingham (UK). These include conductors Riccardo Chailly, Valery Gergiev, Andris Nelsons, Carlo Maria Giulini, Bernard Haitink, Kurt Masur and Sir Simon Rattle, violinists Sarah Chang, Kyung Wha Chung, Yehudi Menuhin and Itzhak Perlman, pianists Vladimir Ashkenazy and Alfred Brendel, singers Bryn Terfel, José Carreras, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Jessye Norman, Luciano Pavarotti, cellists Yo-Yo Ma and Mstislav Rostropovich. This collection is arguably one of the world's largest collections of musical subjects by the same artist. Included in this collection are the large works The Mahler Experience and Elgar’s Dream.
Live Kinetic Painting as performance art
In 1973 Perryman began to work as a performing artist on glass plates placed on a series of overhead projectors, interpreting music visually in real time. In contrast to the trend of creating digitally generated video-projections, Perryman has developed a low-tech analogue alternative to produce huge projections of kinetic colours without pixels. As they listen to the music, the audience watches the evolution and dissolution of the semi-abstract visuals as Perryman paints them. The images from five or more projectors are mixed by hand with an analogue dimmer. Perryman calls this art-form kinetic painting, because the continuously changing sequence of colours and forms only exists in real time, then disappears forever. His paintbrushes also move to the rhythms of the music and make the liquid watercolour splash, pulsate, flow or spread continuously.
Perryman memorises the musical score, then paints his kinetic visual sequences to a carefully rehearsed graphic choreography - although an element of improvisation is always present. The musicians or dancers often stand or perform in these projections, thus becoming totally integrated in the visuals and reacting to them. Perryman’s techniques also provide an experience in synaesthesia, (the sensory cross-over where, for example, one sees colours on hearing music or hears music in visuals).
Since 1973 Perryman has performed frequently in this way for television and with modern-dance groups in Switzerland, France, England, Germany, Finland, the Netherlands and the USA. Perryman made the film “Esquisses” for Télévision Suisse Romande in 1976. In 1979 he performed his abstract impressions of Vivaldi's 'Four Seasons' for French Television with Yehudi Menuhin. An example of his kinetic painting with dance was the modern ballet Invention (co-created with Philip Taylor) for the Netherlands Dance Theater, to open the 1989 Holland Dance Festival.
In 1993, BBC Television made the documentary 'Concerto for Paintbrush and Orchestra', about Perryman's life and work with music. This included a performance of Mussorgsky’s 'Pictures at an Exhibition', with Sir Simon Rattle conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in Symphony Hall, where Perryman could be seen painting his own semi-abstract pictures, inspired by and synchronous to the music.