I’m Jordan Perez, and I create because I don’t really know how not to.

I’ve been drawing for as long as I can remember. Before there were canvases and studios, there were doodles in the margins of my homework. Later, there were drawings covering Post-it notes at my 9-to-5. Wherever I am, the itch to make something eventually finds me.

My work explores the stories we tell about ourselves and our relationships with one another, nature, and the strange experience of being alive. I find myself returning again and again to themes of life and death, psychology, intimacy, beauty, and the natural world. I’m fascinated by the things that connect us, the things we fear losing, and the ways we try to make meaning out of all of it.

Coming from an animation background, characters have naturally become a central part of my visual language. I create figures that feel as though they have existed before the moment you encounter them. They have personalities, histories, desires, and sometimes a little mischief. Even when you don’t know their entire story, I want you to feel that there is one.

Nature often grows alongside them. Flowers, animals, bodies, and imagined creatures become symbols of transformation, mortality, tenderness, and our relationship to something larger than ourselves. I’m drawn to the space where something can be beautiful and a little unsettling at the same time.

At its heart, my work is about connection. Between people. Between ourselves and the natural world. Between an image and the person standing in front of it.

I’m currently building a growing body of work for exhibition and collection, following the same impulse that had me drawing all over my homework years ago.

I’ve just upgraded from the margins.