Born in Bristol in 1933, Clive’s early “three Rs” education was blighted by the 1939-45 war. Leaving commercial school at fifteen, he had a successful career in business whilst qualifying as a chartered secretary. Following some years as Director and Secretary of a number of companies in the glass and plastics industry, he was appointed Bursar of The Royal Ballet School, based at White Lodge in Richmond Park. He retired to Cornwall in 1991. Clive Perryman’s real passion in life, apart from Ann, his wonderful wife, has been music. Art only came into his life on moving to London in 1965 and finding himself by pure chance in a night-school sculpture class. Over the next twenty years the home and garden gradually filled with his sculptures.
For nearly sixty years Clive avoided any form of painting. When he was seven, his infant class was asked to paint a picture of a tree and a river. He thought his was good when the teacher held it up in front of the whole class... “look!” she shouted out loud, “this stupid boy has painted a RED tree trunk and a PURPLE river!”... Everyone laughed and he never used colour again unless someone pointed out the right one. It was not until he failed his medical to become a pilot in the RAF that he was told he was colour blind to the “Red-Green” spectrum. “You might shoot down the wrong planes” said the doctor.
On retiring to St Ives, Clive had plenty of time to sculpt, but ran out of space. By his late sixties he began to experiment with “flat sculptures”, using reclaimed Cornish slate and timber, to make use of wall space. Seeing this, his daughter asked him to make a lighthouse from a piece of driftwood about the size of a cricket bat she had found on Porthmeor Beach. Not having the tools to carve wood, Clive painted a lighthouse on the driftwood with household bathroom blue emulsion paint and Dulux gloss white and has not looked back since. He still reclaims material, where possible driftwood, and just paints in blue (which he sees well), black and white, mixing all three if needed. Family and friends have given him oils and blank canvases for Christmas and birthdays but he can’t get on with these and is not very happy with his only attempt at the harbour, painted from the attic window, high above St Ives. Clive’s walls at home are now covered floor to ceiling with his paintings and although he has given away many and undertaken some commissions from people “up-country”, he has no more room left. However, although he has taken up writing as well as exploring the remoter works of Chopin, he still WANTS TO PAINT! At 75 years of age, with a total lack of training in the art of painting, let alone the use of oil and canvas, he was finally persuaded to enter the professional art arena...