Morgantown, West Virginia is home to two of the three Perrott siblings.
The oldest of the three is Bryn (@deerjerk), known for her wood carvings. Hers are the kind of wooden “stamp” an artist would use to replicate printmaking designs, but Bryn has found an audience by selling the carvings themselves. Her oblong shapes contain depictions of creatures both worldly and beyond, from the “giraffe in a box” (sold out) to the “martian mini” (sold out) to the “big prehistoric bug” (sold out — do you see the pattern?). She insists these characters have no deeper meaning beyond her personal mission to make them look a certain way.
The youngest Perrott is Max (@bckwrdsmax), the one with the most relatively nascent career. He’s likely to be recognized for his acrylic paintings punctuated by a bright red stamp especially resplendent on his monochrome pieces. Max quickly conceded to his disinterest in college academics after high school and took a break from classes to focus on sports. He ended a hiatus from drawing in 2018 to develop his steadfast “bckwrds” brand, and he completed his first mural commission at the newest Short Story Brewing location in Morgantown this past August.
Then the middle sibling is Sage (@haypeep), who currently works as a printmaking professor at East Tennessee State University. She moved to Johnson City in 2018 and sits on the public art board. She teaches lithography and etching in addition to printmaking, her primary interest. On her website, Sage describes the characters in her prints as “grumpy, lumpy, ghost-like creatures situated in cramped, often humorous situations.” She’s the only sibling to hold both a BFA and an MFA in printmaking, from West Virginia University and Ohio University, respectively.
“So many people tell me that all our work looks really similar,” Sage said. “I do want to mention that I have five cats, and we all have animals, and animals are a big influence on us.”
Each has found success in some way: Bryn outsources woodcarvings all over the country through her online shop and has amassed a reach much farther than the Morgantown radius, Max has effectively built a brand for himself while maintaining a full-time job and Sage plays a vital role in Johnson City’s artistic community while investing in the next generation of artists. Their designs are connected through experimentations with space and a focus on “creatures” and distinguished by the unique visual inspirations channeled into their respective pieces.
“Our parents always played this game called ‘the doodle game’ with us,” Sage recalled. “So there was a lot of drawing and stuff in the house anyway, and my dad was really supportive of us drawing because it was an engaging and pretty inexpensive hobby. There was never any question that art was worth something and that there’s value to it.”
“They didn’t have the characteristic some other parents have where they decided that isn’t an important thing,” Bryn reiterated, referring to the incubator in which their parents raised three individual artists without being artists themselves, each progeny six years removed from the last. But despite these gaps in age, “we all get along very well,” Bryn told me. “Which is apparently unusual sometimes in siblings.” They text each other every day, tapping into a built-in artistic community where everyone is honest, “especially Sage.”
On September 13th, the Two/Two/ Eight gallery in Fairmont, WV, hosted “Same Brain: Recent Works by the Perrott Siblings,” a showcase featuring selected wood carvings by Bryn, a series of all-new designs by Sage and a combination of old and new prints by Max, in addition to a line of exclusive bckwrdsmax t-shirt designs commissioned by video production company Mtn Craft. The gallery also featured the first and only collaborative piece between all three siblings, the natural result after years of the same proposition between brother and sisters: “Hey, we should do a collab piece!”
“That was the last kind of thing we did to get ready,” Max said. The three had spent most of their time preparing individual portions for the gallery. Then, a week and a half out, Sage brought up the idea of a collaborative piece, so Bryn offered to carve some of their images and scan them digitally for Sage to print via risograph. Both the resulting print and Bryn’s carving hung at the gallery by its opening.
Anyone who has worked with an artist should note the uniqueness of such a seamless three-way collaboration. It should also be noted that the Perrott siblings’ possession of their own artistry tools streamlines this sort of last-minute collusion, particularly Sage’s personal risograph.
A risograph is a machine akin to a copier, only a hell of a lot more specific. “They’re a pain to maintain, and the drums are incredibly expensive,” Bryn told me. “Just because you have one drum doesn’t mean you can put a different color in it. You have to use only the color that is allotted and programmed to it, and those things cost $1000 apiece.”
Luckily, risographs are so mistakable to the untrained eye for basic copiers that artists can find used machines in the market for significantly less than they’re worth. Sage purchased hers from a high school for $400 and constantly sees churches putting them up for sale. “Someone I know just got one from a martial arts studio,” she said.
Because maintaining a risograph isn’t necessarily an entry-level task, entire businesses can be based on owning one to outsource for third-party printing. It’s one object on a list of materials that might raise the barrier of entry for curious printmakers, a resource problem that exists across a number of artistic media.
Take lithography, for example, which can very basically be described as the printing of oily-inked images from stone plates onto paper. It’s a famously difficult medium that traditionally requires lithographic limestone to yield effective results, but this particular form of limestone was mined dry by one or two now defunct mines in the early 20th century. At this point in time, a person either has it, or they don’t.
“I really like learning, and I really like being in a context where that’s the main goal,” Sage said. “I love sharing knowledge with young people about print processes and things that they’ve never gotten to try, so I hope I get to keep doing that.” Due to recent world events, however, she says she doesn’t know what her position will look like in the next few years.
“I know there’s a lot of contention with universities,” Bryn said. “The problem always is the above, the higher ups and stuff. The cost, the bureaucracy, making professors do things like attend a hundred meetings a day … The focus is not on the students anymore, they just want the money. That’s a problem.”
Bryn graduated from the WVU College of Creative Arts with a BFA in printmaking. “It’s weird,” she said. “Because of the kind of art I do and some of the people I’m around, [people] assume I didn’t go to school.”
At this point in our conversation, she happily trailed off on a ten-minute rant about active WVU President E. Gordon Gee, and the two of us talked faculty cuts, college mergers and program slashes.
“They claimed they needed to cut programs for money,” she said. “But those programs were often self-sufficient …”
West Virginia Watch reports that around 300 faculty members lost their jobs as a result of a $45 million budget shortfall, with programs such as world languages being cut altogether and entities like the WVU Reed College of Media and the College of Creative Arts merging into one school. “They always spin it like it’s beneficial for both, and it’s probably not,” Bryn predicts. “It’s not good for either because it’s not the same thing.”
So, in terms of the artistic necessity of academia, Bryn falls understandably somewhere in the middle.
“Being in a group of people with a similar interest in the arts with the facilities and someone to help you out is a big benefit,” she says. “It shouldn’t cost what it costs, that’s the main problem. You can have a bad attitude and be an academic, and you can have a bad attitude and not be educated too.”
Max’s career is a blatant result of finding the right attitude.
Towards the end of his time in high school, Max developed an affinity for basketball. He let this interest gradually drive him away from class in his first semester at WVU.
“I was a horrible student,” he confessed. “I shouldn’t have gone when I was 18.” To his own admission, he didn’t try very hard, and art professors who recognized his place in the Perrott procession fueled his disillusionment. A little listless, he opted not to finish his first year and started spending more of his newfound time with his oldest sister.
“You know, Bryn’s 12 years older than me,” he said. “We always got along, I just didn’t know her that well, you know? I mean, she was an adult when I was a kid.” They started spending their time together drawing, which rekindled Max’s love for sketch art. When he approached his sisters about how to get better, they were happy to provide support.
“I gave him kind of the lamest advice,” Bryn said. “I don’t know, just keep doing it? You’ll get better?” So he did.
“I did my first commission before I was ready to,” Max recalled. Under his bckwrdsmax brand, he sold prints for about two years before Covid-19 interrupted the market. Then, in his free time, he found a silver lining in learning how to paint.
“[That’s when I started doing] acrylic painting, that’s when I started doing sumi-e paintings, that’s when I started doing all the paintings. I didn’t own brushes before Covid.”
Of the online inspirations Max sought out for his paintings, sumi-e appealed to him the most, perhaps for the bright red stamp-like inclusions he’s since adopted into his own work. Sumi-e is a traditionally black-and-white style of brush painting developed in Ancient China and eventually heavily adopted in Japan, and it has become a huge influence on Max’s work, particularly evident in his monochrome pieces. His choice to combine it with a contemporary “street art” lends it a post-industrial quality on Appalachian canvases like boxcars or the walls of an old factory building. This is why Short Story Brewing commissioned him as an ideal mural artist, and why Max is looking forward to painting more in the future.
Of his contemporary influences, Max felt the obligatory need to shout-out Keith Haring, as well as Spanish artist Nacho Eterno and, of course, Bryn and Sage Perrott. But Max is also a man of archaic taste. He derives influence from the simplicity of cave paintings, and his creatures look uncannily similar to those found on pieces of ancient Peruvian pottery. Seriously, look up “ancient Peruvian pottery.” The resemblance is effortless, right down to the hoop earrings.
Sage, on the other hand, points to graphic novels as a major influence, as well as other visual styles that incorporate text. “I’ve always loved children’s books, and I’ve always loved the incorporation of not necessarily a huge amount of text, but text and image in an equal balance,” she said.
She loves working with zines in particular — she organizes the Johnson City Zine Fest every year and has even taught a few classes on zinemaking. Her fingers are crossed for an upcoming sabbatical wherein she can find time to focus on a new series of zines and prints.
Bryn carves every day and never wants to work for anyone again. Her work has independently sustained her for nine years and counting, and her online store reaches a broad audience. Her personal metric for success amounts to the price of her bills, or maybe slightly above, but certainly below the cost of a sports car.
So, why don’t the Perrott siblings do more collaborative pieces? It certainly pops up in common conversation. But when they all get together, they find themselves distracted with other things.
“Usually, when we get together, we do draw,” Max told me. “But then … we trail off and everyone’s telling stories and hanging out.” It seems the idea never makes it past conception, if that much could even be considered conception. But the siblings also don’t express any regret over their time spent together. The invisible connection they’ve developed through their small community of three continues to reveal itself through the art they make and the inspirations they share amongst each other.
You can browse and purchase products by the Perrott siblings by following them on social media and visiting their online stores: @deerjerk, @haypeep, and @bckwrdsmax.
Photos at Two/Two/Eight gallery opening courtesy of Jared Tadlock
