STUART PERLMAN, PhD
Stuart Perlman is a psychologist, psychoanalyst, and artist who has devoted his life to exploring human experience, trauma, and resilience. For over 45 years, he maintained a private practice in West Los Angeles while teaching at leading universities, publishing widely in psychoanalytic journals, and authoring several books, including The Therapist’s Emotional Survival: Dealing with the Pain of Exploring Trauma; and Open Your Heart Through Art: Portraits of Human Souls and their Stories.
His work has expanded beyond the consulting room and into the streets of Los Angeles. Through his ongoing portrait series, Faces of Homelessness, Dr. Perlman has painted more than 270 large-scale oil portraits of people living on the streets, accompanied by their life stories. His documentary film on the project, Struggle in Paradise, won the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis’ Best Movie of the Year Award. His goal is simple yet urgent: to restore visibility, dignity, and humanity to those too often overlooked. Using a style traditionally reserved for the wealthy and powerful, he paints the faces of those who have lost almost everything, capturing both their suffering and their beauty. As one man told him, “Having my portrait painted made me feel released from being nothing.”
Having just retired, Stuart is a full-time artist/painter. He has been traveling extensively: e.g.: Italy, France, Netherlands, Istanbul and Greece. He is exploring beautiful places and views in Los Angeles. He has been exploring mediums, learning techniques and experimenting with different combinations of materials. He is experimenting with abstraction, new modes of portraits and plein air landscapes. Magic is close at hand. He has been splashing inks and watercolors and watching them blossom into all sorts of complex and mesmerizing images. With acrylic, which is so versatile, he has painted large sunsets and people celebrating. He becomes so mesmerized by the experience of creating color, form and message and exploring his internal experience that all that exists is color and form. The rest of the world disappears. In this altered state he is calm and happy.
Oppression
(Watercolor, Ink and Vinyl Paint, 22.5” x 15”)
Social justice—giving voice to the downtrodden, breaking the silence around trauma, abuse, and systemic atrocities—has been my life’s mission. People of color, particularly Black men, bear the heaviest weight of this oppression. Their lives are marked by constant threat: incarceration rates that far exceed those of other groups, disproportionate killings, and relentless denigration, often at the hands of institutions meant to protect. This portrait is my attempt to bear witness to that truth.
The composition is stark. Ink, like blood, runs down the subject’s face and body, evoking both personal and collective wounds. Behind him, a black background collides with the ghostly pallor of his skin—a deliberate reversal that suggests a path toward empathy and justice. By unsettling the expected, I invite the viewer to step into another’s skin, to confront the consequences of racialized violence not as distant observers but as implicated participants.
Formally, the work is also an experiment in medium. While I have traditionally painted in oils on canvas, this piece uses watercolor, ink, and vinyl paint on paper. Each medium carries its own expressive weight. Ink bleeds into the paper as blood seeps into flesh, uncontained and raw. Vinyl paint creates a black so dense and lightless that it resists reflection—an abyss that swallows the gaze. Watercolor allows for transparency and fragility, echoing the vulnerability of the human spirit under siege.
The convergence of these materials mirrors the layered experience of the sitter—anguish, resilience, and the quiet demand for recognition. The portrait does not offer resolution; instead, it asks the viewer to linger in discomfort, to reckon with the divide of black and white in our society, and to imagine a response rooted in empathy, caring, and justice.