Born and raised in Texas, I received my Bachelor of Science from West Texas State University and my MFA from Texas Christian University. Following graduate school, I spent eight years teaching painting and drawing at the University of Manitoba School of Art in Canada. During this time, my work was primarily installation work, filling entire spaces with varying materials creating spacial transformations.
Shortly after my return to Texas, I put my art on hold and began painting large sets for stage productions and television. I returned to teaching for a few years teaching scenic painting in the theater department at Southern Methodist University. In 2002, I found a renewed interest in my own work by looking at the art of divergent cultures; Australia, Indonesia, New Guinea, China, and Japan, as well as the imagery used in street art and full body tattoos, admiring the honesty and unassuming nature of outsider art. James Hampton’s The Throne of the Third Heaven, the Healing Machines of Emory Blagdon and pretty much all of the work by artists featured in John Beardsley’s Gardens of Revelation continue to influence my work today.
Throughout my career as an artist, scenic artist and educator, I continue to be fascinated with the union of opposites: past and present, exotic and familiar, near and far, real and unreal, symbolic and concrete. The concept of divergent forms coexisting developed into a type of alchemy, morphing the past into the present and vice versa. My work has become a statement about painting in a world dominated by new media. A statement about attempting to create the extraordinary or phenomenal versus following the path of least resistance. A statement about commitment. A statement about discipline. A statement about what the everyday activity of an artist really is. My own personal work has evolved as a never ending quest to combine, define and redefine the color, texture and pattern of the contemporary landscape in response to constant and ever changing cycle of decline and rebirth. This elusive, organic and architectural phenomenon continues to be the overriding theme in my elaborately painted sculptures and installations.
Terry Hays