Although not a household name at the moment, Neil Perry is set for bubbling success. His work is a modernised rehashing of nature versus urban primitivism. Brutally honest and down-to-earth, he has a child-like curiosity and wonderment which translates into his art without belittling the content.

Since January 2009, Perry has established, on a full-time basis, his own ethical and eco-friendly t-shirt company which he operates from his flat. It is only really in the last two years that his artistic career has taken off. Originally reading media studies, Perry passed through a variety of jobs before settling on the arts. The breaking point came when working in a bank. "It was the first time that I was in a nine to five job and I didn’t feel good about what I was doing at work. I didn’t feel good about it, or about myself and I decided I need something that when I came home, I felt that I was doing something creative."

Being creative increasingly became a necessity. "I realized I was never going to be happy enough, so I thought, 'Okay, what will make me happy?' And I realized drawing and painting makes me happy, I could do it all day long. So I thought I need to find a way to do it, make it possible. It’s easier to sell 50 t-shirts for 10 quid than one canvas for £500...I’ve come to the conclusion that often the job that you want isn’t out there unless you create it for yourself...so that’s what I’m essentially doing."

Perry is not simply a commercial t-shirt manufacturer. His body of work is impressive and at home both on t-shirts and canvas. He admits that he is still exploring and experimenting to develop his own style. Though he seems slightly apologetic and insecure about his self-taught status, Perry has the advantage of being free from the inadvertent preconceptions imbued in artists that attend art colleges.

In an art market increasingly obsessed with conceptualism, Perry’s main concern is the aesthetics of his images. "I think technique and how to use material, how to draw was stuff I learned while I was a child. It’s almost like bicycles, you know how to draw and you won’t forget how to draw. But I think in terms of style I haven’t probably developed in the way that other people have who went to art college. I want to experiment with a lot of different styles and I think that’s because I didn’t get the opportunity to originally."

Perry has no sketch book - the archetypical artefact from art colleges - but rather scraps of paper around the flat that are easier to get rid of. "I don’t like people seeing all the mistakes along the way. I want people to see a perfect version. I usually hate what I’ve drawn yesterday." This intense self-criticism is fantastic motivation. "I always think things I did earlier are worse than what I do now, which is probably a good thing, because I’d hate to think that things I did a year ago were better than things I am doing now."

Bizarrely, the artist's best source of inspiration is the Google Image search engine, where he researches interesting poses or moves and tries to capture that in his art. Animals are sometimes selected simply as an aesthetically pleasing shape rather than for their particular connotations.

However, focusing on aesthetics does not mean that Perry's work is devoid of meaning altogether. His art is a visual trickery; visually familiar, the image seems simple and straightforward, yet the content is evolutionary magic. Darwin’s Despair is a fictional creature with the head of a goat, the body of a sloth and the tail of a lobster. Increasingly animals are superimposed upon the human world, in positions or places you wouldn’t expect them. "I love the contrast between man-made and nature. I never draw people but I draw the product of people; I draw things people have created. I like to put the two together, like the Cranes for example, the mechanical crane got its name from the bird. I like little connections like that."

Perry is indeed an artist of the people; he wants to share his wonderment of the world around him. So what’s next for him? "I'm trying to draw dinosaurs and be happy with it! It's strange that I can't draw them, or I struggle to draw them. But then I couldn't draw cats, but now I can. If you draw something that you find interesting you'll make it work."