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Don't call Mike Perry a "painter" or "illustrator," okay? We mean, yes, he's known (and lauded) for his expansive, incredibly detailed 2-D compositions made of paint and canvas. But that's just a slice of his story. "What I do is on the massive scale," he tells us in his sunlit, tool-packed Brooklyn studio. "Really, I'll do anything — illustration just happens to fall into part of what that is."
Transcript
00:02Some people start by making the decision to be creative and then other people like myself I
00:09think just start by by existing. I don't think I have a choice it's just kind of like it's almost
00:15obsessive compulsive desire to just constantly be making things so it's just always what I've
00:21done it's never stopped you know it's like waking up and like picking flowers in the garden this
00:26morning is a big part of what I do and then those flowers all of a sudden just sneak their
00:31way into
00:31a drawing that I'm making and then all of those things kind of slowly feed into each other so
00:37like the little flower shapes turn into just organic circles and those organic circles make
00:43their way into these paintings and then the shapes just slowly build and like compile and it's really
00:48just trying to figure out my voice and language in the world so I think I think about like what
00:54I do
00:54is almost building like a giant vocabulary and with each little moment and shape and idea and color
01:02and texture like my language gets bigger that makes sense just words coming out of my mouth

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