Garry Pereira bases the title of his first London exhibition on an old adage – spend the night on Mount Snowdon, and come down the next morning, either a poet or mad. Pereira is a Romantic, a Wordworthian landscape painter who ‘passionately hates new technology’.
His oil paintings are made ‘en plein air’ on pieces of local slate (stuffed into a pocket) or on canvas in the studio. They reflect his devotion to the seas, lochs, fields and skies of England, Scotland and Wales. He grinds his own paints, studies the craft of paint making, recently travelled to Rome for a specialist course. He is a perfectionist, making his own stretchers, and stretching them himself.
Garry Pereira is angry that no one engages with nature, describing ‘everyone walking around plugged in’ looking at smart phones, seeing nothing. ‘No time to stand and stare’, ‘missing so much and so much’ as poets wrote back in the 1920s.
He calls the titles of his paintings ‘poems’, chooses words with a particular resonance, by listening to the radio, people around him, and music (could be unfashionable punk) which he ‘must have’ while working in the studio.
Pereira, whose family comes from Battersea and Wandsworth, decided to leave the streets of South London fifteen years ago to study for his MA at Norwich School of Art. His love of the Norfolk landscape with vast skies, wide expanses of coastline, informs his work, he has stayed.
