Vanessa Perry is a Visual Artist and for the past 6 years she's been based by the sea on the South East Coast of England. Vanessa's work has always been deeply influenced by the sea and her move to the coast from London has continued to inspire her work and strengthen her bond with nature.
Vanessa grew up in a very creative household and after she left school in Berkshire, she went on to study at Chelsea School of Art, (UAL).
Vanessa works with oil paint and mixed media on canvas. Working from her imagination she uses her emotional expression as her access point to form the basis of her story telling, through colour and texture. Using a palette knife she creates abstract shapes with plaster to develop and grow the structure of the story. Vanessa's distinct blend of plaster and the use of light in her work has kept her active in the art world since first launching her online gallery in 2006.
Vanessa had her first solo show, The Dominating Factor, in 2003. The majority of the collection sold on the opening night. This lead to a series of commissions and Vanessa producing a new body of work to be installed at The Ark in Basingstoke, Hampshire, during 2004.
In 2006 Vanessa curated, and exhibited in, the first ever Vodafone Limited Art Exhibition in Berkshire. This event was a great success, raising money for the charity The Youth Net and leading to Vanessa's nomination for a Community Award from the charity. During the same year Vanessa was commissioned by Vodafone to draw a 'Vodafone Corporate Dream Board' after attending a workshop with the Corporate Sales Team.
Vanessa continued to exhibit her work and in 2008 her paintings were taken to the Great Northern Art Show in Harrogate and the Affordable Art Fair in Bristol.
Today, Vanessa's current work explores the repetition and movement of the sea and her aim here is to deconstruct the elements of the sea, expressing the rise and fall of the continuous yet fleeting moments of each wave. Using texture and light Vanessa hopes to convey how these elements of nature, what arises, what is lost and what cannot be kept or held on to are felt and experienced. These paintings are being developed using just two colours, the second colour being a dilution of the first.
This idea developed from Vanessa's increasing passion for black and white photography, she explains 'when I'm out on the beach photographing, anticipating and waiting for the clouds to create drama, when that moment arrives it's as if a window into another world is opening. Moments when light, space, water, nature all work in harmony together, and then disappear'.