Today we’d like to introduce you to Terry Dixon.
Terry, please kick things off for us by telling us about yourself and your journey so far.
As I am originally at native of Washington DC., my career as an artist started with my mother and father taking me to art galleries and museums. I became saturated with art from the Hirshhorn museum, the National Gallery of Art and the list goes on.
Taking in all of this imagery of artist’s works started to trigger ideas and directions I would follow in the future. In a museum and gallery environment you become influenced by many mediums, and this opens up an avenue of possibilities for a young mind. During my teenage years, my father introduced me to film photography and advertising. Learning how to develop and print my own film photography was dynamic part of my creative process. The photographic images later sparked me in the direction of creating my own mixed media collage style. I started drawing and painting on the photos and the drawing style that I developed was more animated or some viewers called it a schematic grid. During my undergraduate and graduate school years, I started to explore more in the digital side of juxtaposing abstract digital art with my mixed media paintings. The digital world opened up the possibility of scanning in photos, shooting video and creating short animations.
As various years passed by after graduate school, I had a huge hiatus from creating any type of art, because real life responsibilities came into play and I had to work in order to pay the bills. A glimmer of light came back into my artistic soul, when I relocated back to Chicago in 1999. I told myself it’s time to get back into this art game and make this work or don’t do it at all. My mind was made up and I started to experiment with various mixed media techniques. I found my first platform for people to recognize who I was by participated in the School of The Art Institute Bare Walls Live Art Exhibition. I did this for a few years and landed solo art exhibitions at major universities in the Chicago area.
As I started to propel myself through the early days of social media, I would get emails and phone calls to have exhibitions in different parts of the country. Branching out from your natural surroundings is healthy for an artist and it matured my career.
Fast forward through exhibiting in the United States, I had the chance in 2014 to visit China. Traveling to a different hemisphere really opened my eyes. China is very rich in culture, and as I explored the landscape through the lens of my camera, I was destined to return on my own.
Upon returning to the states from my trip to China, I quickly started to network with the business cards, which I accumulated from various other art scholars abroad. I was lucky enough to network with an individual to return as a visiting artist and art professor in 2015. In order to sell myself, I had to put together a portfolio of my work, because my biggest goal was to have a solo art exhibition in China.
In 2016, I returned again to give a lecture about my art at the United States Consulate office in Guangzhou China. The locals were intrigued with my art style and this was the selling point that landed my solo art exhibition and artist residency in the summer of 2017. Living in China for a short period of time while doing the artist residency allowed for me to have total mental freedom to create. I decided to dig into my earlier roots of working only with textures, lines colors and various mediums that would add dynamics to the surface of my pieces. During the preparation of working in the residency studio, I created 22 works of art from May to July. This kept be highly disciplined and humble. I titled my solo art exhibition in China, Kinetic Abstraction, because of the movement of my lines within the surface of my paintings.
The experience in China is almost too dynamic to explain, but I took in so much culturally, that it will be an experience that I will never forget
Can you give our readers some background on your art?
My style of work is based on an abstract mixed style can be very intuitive and mainly inspired and generated for my love of jazz and electronic music.
During the years my work has gone through political art, urban mixed media poetry stories and the exploration of color, lines, images and textures. Having the experience of creating different works of art, has let my audience see various sides of me, but they can always see the signature style in various creations. I would like my audience to interpret their own opinions of my work, because it lets them study it and come up with their own conclusions.
One part of art is always including the visual mystery.
How do you think about success, as an artist, and what do quality do you feel is most helpful?
Staying humble and never believing your own hype has been my formula for success. Always creating work on a daily bases and networking as much as possible, so people will still know that you are still relevant.
What’s the best way for someone to check out your work and provide support?
People can see my work on www.artistterry.com
Contact Info:
- Website: www.artistterry.com
- Phone: (847) 271-8930
- Email: artistterrydixon@gmail.com
- Instagram: artistterrydixon
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/artistterrydixon/
- Twitter: @Artist_T_Dixon
Image Credit:
All images were taken by artist Terry Dixon
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