Brad Permar Art

Brad Permar is a lifelong artist.

Brad Permar grew up in Marshalltown, Iowa, surrounded by vast fields and an endless horizon. As a young person, he filled every free moment with music, as a trombonist in Marching Band, with sports, competing in wrestling and football, and with hard physical work, picking corn under the sizzling Iowan sun. At Grinnell College, he developed interests in art and literature while pursuing an anthropology major. Brad moved East to Boston where he developed his art portfolio and dove into the city’s music scene. Working as a bar back in music clubs gave Brad direct access to punk, jazz, rock, and blues bands and artists .

Brad earned his Bachelor’s in Fine Art at the Museum of Fine Arts School at Tufts. While at the Museum School, he met mentor and beloved Boston educator Kaji Aso, where he was exposed not only to painting techniques, but to Mr. Aso’s expertise in calligraphy, opera, tea ceremony, white-water rafting, long-distance running, and other creative practices. Brad participated in tea ceremony, attended operas, trained for and ran the Boston Marathon as well as traveled on white water rafting expeditions with Mr. Aso and classmates, while pursuing his masters at Tufts. He showed his work at the Kaji Aso Studio gGallery, then called the Nature Temptation Gallery.

In 1997, Brad moved with his family to Martha’s Vineyard where he worked as a landscaper. For over 20 years, Brad has mowed, sprayed, and shaped the lawns of hundreds of Martha’s Vineyard properties, from snug cottages to vast mansions and remote celebrity homes. Every year, when his landscaping work ceases for the winter, Brad unpacks his easel, his oil paints, and his collection of art books. He often chooses a “master” to learn from, spending seasons with the works of Monet, Klimpt, Turner, and others. Brad has painted evocative portraits and vibrant abstract works. He has also been known to sculpt candlesticks and magical creatures when a snowstorm wipes the electricity. And he encourages and guides the creative pursuits of his three children Sam, Sarah, and Tessa.

Brad is best known for his landscapes which he paints from imagination in the dead of winter. Through these depictions of trees, land, and coast, Brad combines the vast horizons of his youth with the forests, fields, and coastal inlets of Martha’s Vineyard. Different from plein air painting which the painter captures the outdoor landscape before them in that moment, Brad fuses the memories of places he has been with imagined landscapes of the future. He pulls from a range of styles including impressionism, pointillism, abstractionism, and expressionism to create an almost sensory experience for the viewer, offering a chance to transport, not to a real location, but to a place that really must be real, somewhere.

Brad lives in West Tisbury with his wife Linda and youngest daughter Sarah. He recently acted in the short film TICK, a satirical horror about ticks and people on Martha’s Vineyard. He can be reached in the off-season (November through April) by email.