Perry Obee Interview, June 2024

In the Studio with Perry Obee

June 5th, 2024

Artist, Perry Obee, virtually sat down with us to discuss his professional background and the ins-and-outs of his multimedia practice including painting, drawing, and printmaking. Having apprenticed with a Tamarind trained Master Printer for 9 years, Obee studied traditional stone and plate lithography, intaglio, and relief printmaking, as well as paper making, and adhesive processes. His work addresses tension across a variety of dynamics including the struggles between perception and experience, emotion and intellect, beauty and the essential, balance and instability, and unity and chaos. Obee is inspired by the liberated use of color and abstract depiction of space and form honed by Modern and Post-Modern figurative and abstract artists, such as Matisse, Bonnard, and Vuillard. Additionally, he is influenced by the graphic lines and economic approach to space in Chinese Landscape Painting.

CBCA: What’s your background? Did you always want to be an artist?

PO: When I was 6 years old I decided that when I grew up I wanted to be an artist. At the time, late ‘80s, I was drawing the teenage mutant ninja turtles better than my classmates and I guess I enjoyed the recognition. From then on I was always drawing and painting. I discovered printmaking in undergrad at Ohio Wesleyan University. Printmaking allowed me to use my drawing and painting but it also includes a technical and process oriented side of creation that is totally different. The process is less direct than painting and drawing, and I liked how it is slowed down and makes me consider my creative decisions in a more deliberate manner. Plus the printshop is a community of people making work together which excites and invigorates me. Later on I discovered collaborative printmaking, where I apply my skills in the technical side of printmaking along with my experiences as an artist to guide other artists through the process of creating works in printmaking.

CBCA: What excites you to make your work? Why do you make art?

PO: Image making excites me. How is it that marks of shapes and color on a flat surface can convey meaning and evoke strong responses to a viewer? This fascinates me. I think it’s something innate in us as humans because we have been making images, drawings and paintings, as long as we have existed, and have always revered them. My interest is to investigate this phenomenon of the power of the graphic image. In doing so, I’m free to explore different mediums, different styles, different subject matter, because it’s all in pursuit of discovering how we interpret images.

CBCA: What artist(s) or movement(s) have influenced your work?

PO: In painting, the first artist that opened a door in a really meaningful way was Richard Diebenkorn. He bridged the gap from representation to abstraction for me. After him I could appreciate Matisse in a new way and for me, Matisse is at the top. The other Nabis artists, particularly Bonnard and Vuillard, are up there too. They also did work in printmaking, particularly lithography, which I admire greatly. In printmaking, I’m inspired by the work of collaborative printers that have pushed artists to make their best work in printmaking. Fernand Mourlot for example who worked with Matisse and Picasso. The printers of the 20th century in the US like Ken Tyler who founded Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angelos, and all the printers from Tamarind Institute that have established shops and furthered the medium of lithography by introducing it to new artists and leading established artists through the processes of printmaking. It was one of my greatest honors to be accepted into the Tamarind printer training program and to complete a Master Printer apprenticeship in 2020. I now operate a collaborative print studio near Asheville, NC, where I work with artists of all levels, both regionally and nationally, to produce original works in fine art printmaking.

One other art tradition that has had great effect on me is Chinese and Japanese landscape painting. In 2013 I was assigned to teach an Asian art history course and I had never studied Asian art. I was reading the text book one chapter ahead of my students as I prepared my lectures. That experience opened my eyes to the graphic power and aesthetic quality of these paintings that exist on an entirely different level than western art history. The depictions of space, form, color, and design in the eastern traditions opened up doors for me that have been incredibly influential.

CBCA: What informs your work? What themes do you pursue?

PO: Since my exploration is essentially form in the graphic arts of painting, drawing, and printmaking, my subject matter is quite varied. Being inspired by artists like Matisse and Diebenkorn, I am looking at how abstraction can be used in representational art. My subjects include still life, landscape, portraits, and pure invented abstractions. However, another important part for me is using direct observation. I rarely work from photographs. There is something about the translation of what I see in three dimensions into the two dimensions of graphic images that excites me. As a result of this, my subjects come from my life and my experiences. I paint the people, places, and things that surround me. These become the basis for explorations of form and expression.

CBCA: Why/How have you chosen your medium? Which creative medium would you love to pursue but haven’t yet?

PO: While I work in painting, drawing, and printmaking, for the last several years my chosen medium has been predominately lithography. For those unfamiliar, traditional lithography is a printmaking medium where the artist draws on slabs of limestone. The drawing is processed with chemicals to become stabilized in the stone surface, and then is inked and printed using a printing press. The images can become complex through layers of color and transparent colors can combine to create even more colors. This process, as I’ve previously mentioned, is another level of interest for me beyond just image making. It allows me to consider design, mark-making, expression, color, arrangement, composition, and other aspects, all as individual components that can be arranged and re-arranged in a multitude of ways.

CBCA: How has your work progressed? How has your practice changed over time?

PO: In undergrad I studied both painting and printmaking. I pursued printmaking after graduation and considered applying to grad schools for print, but instead was invited to graduate school in painting at Western Connecticut University. While there, I met a Tamarind Master Printer, Jim Reed, and while I was studying painting in grad school I also began working with him at his shop, Milestone Graphics in Bridgeport, CT. Painting and printmaking were for a long time equally important to me, but over time my path was leading more and more into the printmaking and especially the collaborative printmaking world. I still love to paint and draw, but currently I am focused on running my own professional collaborative printmaking studio, Obee Editions, in Black Mountain NC, just outside Asheville. What excites me is working with new artists everyday that bring entirely new sets of problems to solve. The creative process as a team working on a shared problem keeps me energized and engaged. Plus I get to use my knowledge of printmaking techniques to help artists achieve work that they couldn’t produce on their own, and that I wouldn’t have come up with to make on my own either. It’s incredibly enriching practice. My wife and I run the business together and she operates a letterpress and book bindery alongside my collaborative studio.