“An early influence on Perceval was Arnold Shore, who he met as a teenager and was interested in the heavily laden brush of unmixed colour used by Van Gogh. Other notable influences are Bosch, Brueghel, Tintoretto, El Greco, Rembrandt, Hogarth and Blake and as with many artists a lot of the work has reference to personal and childhood experience. Perceval covers most genres; his work includes landscapes, such as the Williamstown Series, religious and irreverent themes and some portraiture. His best periods are the forties and fifties when his paintings included The Nightmare and Mask Series, master-pieces like Negroes at Night, 1944, and Woman Pushing a Boy with Polio, 1943 where he uses repetitive brush strokes with each stroke laid side by side as seen in work by some of the Fauves. In the fifties, Perceval painted the Gaffney Creek Landscapes and the humorous Goat in a Cabbage Patch, 1956 where he uses many different textures of brushstroke as well as the drip application in quite illogical colours, which enhances surface quality.”

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