STUART PERLMAN
Breaking Out: Freedom to Play
I am exploding with fun, spontaneity and self-expression, playing with inks, acrylics, watercolors on plastic, paper and canvas - about joy, life transitions and breaking obstacles. A completely new body of work after 14 years spending several hours each day and receiving many awards for painting 260 large oil-on-canvas portraits of people living and dying on the streets. This all parallels my breaking out by retiring from my clinical practice of almost 50 years mostly treating trauma survivors. I am having a great time playing and feeling alive and expressing it in my art, creating for hours every day. I want to encourage everyone to explore and play and break out by showing the process I have gone through and the experiments I have tried!! Life can be filled with passion and joy, creativity and self-expression in a way I never thought possible. Yet it is also scary to let go of successful life structures and identities which may have turned into a prison. An exciting new stage of life illustrated in color.
About The Speaker:
STUART PERLMAN, Ph.D. has been a psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice in West Los Angeles for over 40 years. He received a Ph.D. from UCLA in clinical psychology, and a second Ph.D. in psychoanalysis. He has published many articles in psychoanalytic journals, and authored the book, The Therapist’s Emotional Survival: Dealing with the Pain of Exploring Trauma. His book, Struggle in Paradise and his newest book, Open Your Heart Through Art: Painting Human Souls and Their Stories, are about 250 homeless individuals, featuring moving oil-on-canvas portraits, their life stories and what happens to them years later. He has had over 60 exhibitions with over 200 thousand people viewing them. Dr. Perlman won the 2016 Los Angeles County Psychological Association’s Social Justice Award. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors gave him an award in 2017 for his work on behalf of homeless people. Fine Art Connoisseur describes these as “Great Art Worldwide.”
The Faces Of Homelessness portrait project has been exhibited nationally, covered on Public Radio (KPCC), featured in print in Column One of the front page of the Los Angeles Times, and in other national and international publications including The Guardian (London), Taipei Times (Taiwan), Vanity Fair Italia and a cover story in the Jewish Journal. Dr. Perlman’s documentary about this project, Struggle in Paradise, won the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis’ Best Movie of the Year Award. He has received a 2023 lifetime achievement award from the International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education, “Distinguished Educator.”
