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Every Philadelphian knows Rocky ran through the Italian Market on his way to the Art Museum steps, but a better kept secret is his detour through Rittenhouse Square to drop in at the Perry Milou Gallery, 128 S. 18^th St., which opened in May of this year. Well, in truth, it was Rocky’s alter-ego, Sylvester Stallone, who strolled in one afternoon and happened upon artist Milou painting in the front window of his gallery-cum-studio. Milou immediately struck up a conversation with the actor, who is a painter himself. “He paints with a palette knife,” Milou confided knowingly. And, in the end, Milou’s Balboa Blues found its way into Stallone’s personal collection.

Milou’s family lived in Chestnut Hill Village (his father is noted restaurateur Neil Stein), and he attended local elementary schools until the family moved to Haverford when he was 11. But it was here, in Mt. Airy, where Milou found his muse. The then-five-year-old artist (now 34) was handed crayons and told, with his class, to make a Huckleberry Finn mural. “I started drawing, and everyone started watching,” he remembers, smiling. “My teacher just said, ‘keep on going, Perry.’”

Milou graduated from Haverford High School in the mid-’80s, where, by his own accounts, he spent three or four hours a day in the art room. Then, deciding “to skip town for a while,” he went on to get his BFA from the University of Arizona. In Tucson, he was the first student to develop his own curriculum. Not surprisingly, the engaging Milou convinced the dean (luckily for him, a Philadelphia native) to let him pick and choose among the classes offered in graphic design, printmaking, sculpture and painting, rather than specialize in one medium, as was the usual modus operandi. “And that’s where my style comes from,” Milou said, glancing toward canvases prepared with an obvious adherence to graphic and pop traditions, as well as a nod to classicism and French Impressionism. He attributes his success to the “freedom to explore.”

“I’m still going in a lot of directions,” Milou said, debunking the belief that an artist must adhere to one style. “My diversity is my strength.” And, as marketing savvy as he is artistically creative, Milou has a firm knowledge of the tastes of his patrons.

At one point, Milou opened his own art school in Bala Cynwyd. “I always loved kids,” he said, ready for a career adjustment after five years of bartending, where he developed “communication skills.” Seventy-five to 100 children passed through his classrooms weekly, delving into clay, printmaking, painting and sculpture. While he enjoyed the kids and “the drama,” he adds slyly, immensely, “it burned me out and took away from my own creativity.”

Like other masters before him, Milou began painting outdoors in the city. He worked in Rittenhouse Square for a time before opening his own gallery on South 18th Street. “You’ve got to take chances,” he said. “No risk, no reward.” Labeled as a “street artist,” Milou found himself at a disadvantage in selling his compositions. So, he took the leap and set up a gallery to merchandise his own work, as well as that of other emerging artists on the local scene.

Milou paints the iconic images of Philadelphia, particularly those of athletes like Allen Iverson and Donovan McNabb. “It’s what sells,” he said, keeping a firm grasp on the pulse of the city and her citizens’ wallets. “But because of my style, I have the ability to keep it fresh. I can paint Boathouse Row 20 different ways.” Well, an artist does have to eat, and Milou fears his “business mind fights his artistic one.” And it does all come down to business, Milou said. “You cannot predict the success of an artist based on talent.” Indeed, this engaging young man’s entrepreneurial skills are so polished, one could almost imagine this to be a corporate board room rather than an art gallery. Seldom does such duality of talent exist.

In addition to cityscapes like Rocky looking down the Parkway, Milou turns on occasion to popular culture, producing oils of famous bad boys from James Dean to Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra and Tony Soprano; well, he does toss in John Timoney for a bit of balance. Politicos John Street and Sam Katz can be found here, still arguing, and around the corner, we find President Bush. The day after 9/11 he “couldn’t watch any more TV” and went out into the street to paint. His patriotic images grew out of the devastation — witness the fierce American eagle rising above the Twin Towers in red, white and blue. Andy Warhol looks down from the gallery walls, eating his Campbell’s alphabet soup amid applied sparkles and spangles. When the van Gogh blockbuster came to the art museum a few years ago, Milou was commissioned to paint “Vincent Does the Museum.”

In addition to paintings of contemporary sports stars, Perry has recreated a pivotal minute between Tug McGraw and Pete Rose from the 1980 World Series. Milou also does a splendid job with portrait commissions of adults, children and animals.

Milou has been, as he puts it, “inspired by everything” ever since he “took crayon to paper bag 28 years ago.” Growing up, he looked to Peter Max, Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein for inspiration. College art history courses introduced him to the Italian Renaissance masters and the Impressionists.

Despite his keen sense of the market, he finds time to indulge his creative sensibilities as well. A Fauvist-colored view of San Francisco Bay is what he does for love. Then there’s the snarling, savage shark who bursts the bars of the shark cage, allowing Milou to append his sculptural talents to oil painting. He has also collaborated with local artist Charles Cushing on gigantic canvases that they have painted publicly on the streets of Philadelphia, Boston and New York.

And Milou is as creatively innovative as he is commercially attuned. A number of his oils are painted in a technique casual viewers might call “impressionistic” but what the artist describes as his “rain” technique. “It’s based on watching rain roll down the window,” he explains. The placement of his pigment is “premeditated — I put it where I want it to be. Then it’s a kinetic, spontaneous thing. It’s like watching a drop of rain hit the window, roll down, merge into another drop and take a new path.”

The Perry Milou Gallery at 128 S. 18th St. (between Walnut and Sansom) may be reached by telephone at 215-568-3380 or on the Web at www.perrymilou.com.