The brilliant Brooklyn artist and designer Mike Perry is probably best known for designing the opening credits of Comedy Central's Broad City, his marathon nude-drawing sessions, and his kaleidoscopic screenprints. But these days he's holed up in his Crown Heights, Brooklyn, studio working on a series of mixed-media paintings for an upcoming gallery show.
Like Perry's often cheeky and vibrant artworks—"My one true crutch is using fluorescent colors in everything," he says—the walls are strewn with stencils, art supplies, random objects (like dice and bamboo sporks), and other ephemera.
"It's just turned into it's own living beast," he says of the studio, from which he's worked for the past seven years. "It's what happens when you have some space to put stuff—sometimes the creative hoarder within you fills it with things."
Perry recently completed an animated video celebrating the "Comfort Criteria" of the late, great Bill Stumpf, designer of the iconic Aeron chair. Commissioned by Herman Miller, he was tasked with communicating the ideas behind sitting without actually showing the chair. He and his assistant, J. Bell, combined illustrations with paper cut-outs to produce the video.
Though a lot of his recent work has been in animation, Perry doesn't limit himself to any one medium and his studio shifts from work like shooting the short Herman Miller film to churning out risograph prints on any given day.
"I'm pretty nerdy about my art supplies," he says. "I've always enjoyed going to at stores and finding materials, the process of making things, and getting my hands dirty. Over time you learn what materials do and how they react—it almost becomes like an academic study of the viscosity and luminosity of materials ... the fun part of making stuff is you can make a mess."
Catch a few snapshots of Perry's studio in the slide show above.
All Photos: Romek Rasenas