Samuel Perry is a contemporary abstract painter who builds toward contradiction rather than away from it. Each painting begins with a single gesture — an intentional surrender to imperfection that is as much philosophy as technique. What follows is a negotiation between control and disorder, structure and spontaneity, the mark he intended and the one the canvas made possible. The tension never fully resolves. That’s the point.Perry is a San Diego-based painter whose large-scale works are made on unprimed canvas — a deliberate choice that makes unpredictability a collaborator. Layers of texture, chromatic contrast, and fluid mark-making build against calculated restraint, producing compositions that hold opposing forces in suspension without collapsing them. The practice grew out of something personal: anxiety, and the slow discovery that the studio could contain what nothing else could. Relinquishing control became its own kind of mastery.His work is held in luxury hotel and private collections, moving between public and private spaces with equal authority — meditative where stillness is needed, electric where it isn’t.Work by Samuel Perry is available at Illumine Gallery. Please inquire for commissions and shipping.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​