In 1970, Margot Perryman's work was seen in a group show including Margaret Mellis at the Richard Demarco Gallery, Edinburgh. Richard Demarco described Perryman and Mellis as 'among the rare class of woman artist who defies the definition of "woman artist" They are simply painters who happen, thankfully, to be intelligent women who have stuck (despite the difficulties of this man's world) to their self-appointed task of painting paintings.' He quoted the critic Bryan Robertson on Ferryman's work: 'inspection of any one painting shows at once that what appears to be a blank surface conceals only momentarily a lot of lively action expressed in very subtle terms of edges, alignments, disproportionate and unexpected scale'.
Perryman trained at Harrow School of Art and the Slade. From 1965-6 she lived in New York where she came across American post-war abstraction, and worked her way through various facets of it. The amorphous shapes, and areas of thin, staining paint she began to use (that characterized the paintings she showed at her 1965 solo exhibition at London's New Art Centre), suggests that she had seen the work of Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis. Later, when she had returned to Britain, Perryman moved towards hard-edged geometric abstraction, in which black rectangles and squares were played off against areas of muted color.
Perryman has taught at a number of art colleges. She has had a series of solo shows at the New Art Centre, London, and has also exhibited at the John Moore's exhibition (1965) and with the London Group and the Scottish Society of Women Artists in Edinburgh. |
