Robert Joseph Perillat

Robert Perillat was born in Seattle, Washington, on December 5, 1922. At twenty-three he received his B.A. from St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park, California. In 1951 he received his M.A. from the College of Notre Dame with a thesis on Jacques Maritain and the problem of subsistence, and in 1958 he completed his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, with a dissertation on St. Thomas Aquinas and the principle of subsistence — the notion of the person.

Perillat began teaching in 1954 as an assistant professor of philosophy at Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana, where he remained until 1962, when he accepted an appointment at the College of New Rochelle, New York. In 1967 he was appointed assistant professor of philosophy at the State University of New York at Albany, and in 1968 he became Vice President for Student Affairs at Russell Sage College in Troy, New York. He left in 1969 to join the young Woodstock generation, rejecting the materialism of mainstream America.

Woodstock

Although he left his degrees and titles behind, Perillat carried with him years of study and teaching in philosophy and an intrinsic drive to work as an artist. He had made sculpture and drawings throughout his life; in 1969, at the age of forty-seven, he began to focus on painting.

He moved into a “goat shed” on a mountainside in Woodstock, New York, to search for the true realization of his life’s purpose. In Socratic fashion, he did not pursue the quest in solitude, but threw himself into the impassioned debates and protests of a time of political and social upheaval. Living on Maverick Road, he was known around town as “Woodstock Bob.” Trading wits with the mavericks of Woodstock, running for mayor, and constantly travelling to New York City to “do the galleries,” he made great gains in conceptual sophistication and mastery of materials. Rauschenberg and Johns were especially influential during this period.

Stinson Beach

After seven years in Woodstock, Perillat returned to his native California, drawn perhaps by the poetry and the social and political movements of the San Francisco art scene. He settled nearby in Stinson Beach and devoted himself to painting. Over the next several years he produced hundreds of paintings, many of which he judged unsatisfactory and selectively destroyed.

His mixed-media abstract expressionist paintings and patterned works — sometimes large-scale collages — posed real problems for his way of life. His small studio held a single bed and a hot plate, and would not have been usable without the kindness of neighbors who stored hundreds of his paintings for him.

Brooklyn

In 1981, at the suggestion of George McClancy, Perillat returned to New York. In an industrial loft in Brooklyn, just over the Williamsburg Bridge from Manhattan, he began the most intense and productive period of his artistic life, working long solitary hours into the night and spending his days following the city’s gallery season with an almost religious dedication. Occasionally he would engage an artist or dealer in discussion — among them David McKee of McKee Gallery, who recognized him as someone to be taken seriously.

Richard Solomon of Pace Editions and the Pace Gallery came to see a series of his new paintings, spending a morning discussing their strengths and weaknesses. Even so, Perillat never made a serious effort to find a dealer or gallery to represent him. When he did go public with his work, it was usually in a modest way: twice entering Discoveries, the annual citywide juried competition for under-recognized older artists, he won first prize in 1986 and again in 1988, both times in exhibitions curated by Village Voice critic Peter Frank.

Out of these one hundred and eighty-one paintings I could pick out forty for a one-man show that would knock the socks off New York. There is no doubt in my mind that my work is going to sell, and sell well. But right now I am not ready for that sort of stuff. I’m busy right now making it up this cliff… discovering in a legitimate and painful way who I am as an artist. I am very much aware of the premium the art world places on style. Unfortunately most artists’ work I see in the galleries is the result of a premature arresting of style that results in cleverness without intuition, self-repetition without creation, method without madness, instant recognition without substance. I prefer the loneliness of the long-distance runner.

I guess I am old enough to want to uncover the treasure for my own sake. I want the thing itself. The fame… the fortune… will come, I am sure, but it is only secondary to what I thirst for — the full birth of myself into the world as a true and complete artist.

Robert Perillat

Robert Perillat died in April 1991.

It has been a long journey. No part of it do I regret and nothing of it has been wasted. I am profoundly thankful to life for giving me so much and above all, for moving me so deeply in so many, many ways.

Robert Perillat

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