Lincoln Perry is justly celebrated for his murals and edgy narrative figure paintings, with their saturated palette and multifaceted architectural compositions--Poussin refracted through de Chirico. This beautiful new book showcases his images of Charlottesville, Virginia--many of them multipanel compositions featuring the University of Virginia and its environs--accompanied by an essay and interview by his wife, the writer Ann Beattie.

Perry's mural The Student's Progress, which depicts a woman's education and social experience from matriculation through graduation, is familiar to U.Va. students, faculty, and visitors, but Perry has been painting Charlottesville subjects on and off since 1985, when he first moved to town. From his early explorations of the complex relationships between professors and students, played out against the backdrop of Jefferson's Lawn, through his intriguing depictions of the city's domestic interiors, buildings, and streets, Perry illuminates a different side of a place widely appreciated for its history and natural beauty.

Charlottesville, writes Beattie, "both disturbs and calls to [Perry]: it's a paradoxically comfortable and uncomfortable not-quite-home he has been drawn to many times for reasons he can't easily articulate.... I think that Lincoln likes the town's quirkiness and its lack of uniformity. It's also a place that allows him to practice the x-ray vision so many visual people have for underpinnings: the contradictions that can be drawn upon and aesthetically dramatized.... The place sparks his imagination, and with his paintbrush, he sparks it, charging the air with a bit of unexpected--but very recognizable--light."

Together, Perry and Beattie give us a view of Charlottesville, of place and artistic production, that carries with it the warmth of recognition and the thrill of discovery.

Publication made possible by generous support from the W. L. Lyons Brown Jr. Charitable Foundation

Author: Lincoln Perry, Ann Beattie
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 01/03/2006
Pages: 104
Weight: 1.75lbs
Size: 9.80h x 10.26w x 0.56d
ISBN: 9780813925035


Review Citation(s):
Ingram Advance 11/01/2005 pg. 41

About the Author

Lincoln Perry, whose work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in New York, Washington, D.C., and from California to Maine to Florida, is Distinguished Visiting Artist at the University of Virginia. Ann Beattie, Edgar Allan Poe Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia, is the author of Follies: New Stories, among fifteen novels and story collections, the illustrated monograph Alex Katz, and essays on contemporary photography.