Viridian Artists is pleased to present Chris Terry’s Altars and offerings, his first solo exhibition with Viridian Artists. On view from October 1 through October 26, the exhibition will feature a series of recent paintings. The opening reception will take place on Thursday, October 3, from 6–8pm with a closing reception occurring the last day of the exhibit on Saturday, October 26, 4–6pm.

Like many artists, Chris Terry’s influences and formative experiences are many, varied, and sometimes even contradictory. Perhaps the most profound influence comes from his growing up with a healthy dose of Roman Catholicism: parochial school, altar boy, and singing in the choir, and although the doctrines inherent in Catholicism stopped making sense, his fascination with the ritual continues. Perhaps it is nothing more than the human need for ritual and symbolic significance that we attach to certain objects, but Terry feels a personal need to create ritual in his own work. After making paintings not unlike those in this exhibit for more than 10 years, a viewer commented on the similarity to religious altars which they saw in his paintings. Though the similarity was not intentional on his part, it was clearly buried deep in his subconscious.

Working primarily in the still life tradition, the artist is fascinated with shape and the sense of invention when moving objects in the composition, overlapping and creating new shapes from the objects and the backgrounds in ways that cannot be easily done with landscape or figurative subject matter. A third component of his creative practice is his interest in color. Terry has always been drawn to Bonnard, Diebenkorn, Klee, Matisse and many other artists who use color inventively. A chance meeting at California State University where he once taught, led to an invitation to teach as a Visiting Professor at Universität Essen in Germany. That experience deepened his interest in the Bauhaus and by extension, Albers. Over the years, he lived in Germany and traveled through Europe, spending 6 weeks in Rome at The American Academy in their “visiting artists” program.

Since that time he has taught at many colleges, though primarily at Utah State University where, in an extension of his teaching practice, he organized travel programs with students, enriching his own life experiences as well as those of his students.

Now the focus is on his painting and the works in this exhibit attest to his ongoing creation of alters and offerings in quiet settings and simple compositions. We are most often looking at a table with one or more objects sitting quietly in a blue or golden toned light, the light perhaps colored by the wall behind and the tablecloths always freshly unfolded, creating shapes that add texture to the compositions.

We look forward to sharing theseAltars and offerings with you in person and perhaps they will inspire your memories of formative moments in your own lives.