In 1973 Perryman began to work as a performing artist painting on glass plates, placed on a series of  overhead projectors, interpreting music visually in real time. In contrast to the trend of creating digitally generated video-projections, Perryman has developed an economic low-tech alternative that retains the sensual organic qualities of the colours and the gestures of painting by hand. The light of the overhead projectors shines through Perryman’s glass plates to give the transparent colours an extraordinary luminous intensity when projected on a giant screen. As they listen, the audience watches the evolution and dissolution of Perryman’s abstract images.

The magnified images from five or more projectors are mixed by hand with an analogue dimmer. Perryman’s semi-abstract, lyrical expressionist visuals are not illustrations, but rather images keyed to the ideas and feelings of the music, enriching the musical experience yet remaining in the memory as powerful works of art in their own right. Perryman calls this art form kinetic painting, because it is a continuously changing sequence of colours and forms that only exists in real time, then disappears forever. His paint brushes also move to the rhythms of the music and make the liquid watercolour splash, pulsate, pulsate, flow or spread continually.

After memorizing the musical score, Perryman paints his kinetic visual sequences to a carefully rehearsed graphic choreography, although an element of improvisation is always present. The musicians or dancers often stand or perform in these projections, thus becoming totally integrated in the visuals and reacting to them. Perryman’s techniques also provide an experience in synesthesia, (the sensory cross-over where, for example, you see colours on hearing music or hear music in visuals). The spectator is a surprised witness of an ongoing live creative process that is in total harmony with the musical experience.

Since 1973 Perryman has performed frequently in this way for television and with modern-dance groups in Switzerland, France, England, the Netherlands, South Korea and the USA. Perryman made the film Esquisses for Télévision Suisse Romande in 1976. In 1979 he performed his abstract impressions of Vivaldi's Four Seasons for French Television with Yehudi Menuhin, who once said: “Perryman is a musician, who makes music with his paint brush”. An example of his kinetic painting with dance was the modern ballet Invention (co-created with Philip Taylor) for the Netherlands Dance Theater, to open the 1989 Holland Dance Festival. 

In 1993, BBC Television made the major documentary Concerto for Paintbrush and Orchestra, about Perryman's life and work with music.  The latter part of this programme was devoted to a performance of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, with Sir Simon Rattle conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in Symphony Hall, where Perryman could be seen painting his own semi-abstract pictures, inspired by and synchronous to the music. The Times described the performance as “an ingenious audio-visual experiment, with brilliantly conceived imagery”.

Perryman has also performed with José Carreras, Amanda Roocroft and the Hallé Orchestra (1994), with percussionist Evelyn Glennie (1998), Holland Symfonia (Ravel) (2004), the Rotterdam Philharmonic (2004), the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra (Stravinsky: The Soldier’s Tale) (2004), the Arnhem Philharmonic (2004) and with the Circle Percussion ensemble in spectacular Kodo-style performances (frequently between 1978 and 2009). In 2005 he appeared with the Flemish Radio Orchestra in a performance of John Adams’ El Dorado and toured Belgium with the Flemish Radio Choir in a programme entitled The Occupied City. In 2006 he performed in Amsterdam in a Dutch version of Gertrude Stein’s chamber opera Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights, with music by Guus Janssen.  At the 2007 Connecticut Greenwich Music Festival Perryman performed John Adams’ Hallelujah Junction (with pianists Steve Beck and Andrew Armstrong).  He has also performed several times in Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Qatar.