The Hastings Gallery

It began with a provocation: what happens when a colorist known for vibrancy and detail limits the palette, strips away the figures, and lets the horizon do the talking? For Palm Springs–based artist Terry Hastings, Chromatica emerged from that quiet challenge—an invitation to distill. “I’ve always been complimented on my mastery of color,” Hastings reflects. “So I really wanted to challenge myself with an extremely limited palette.”

The result is a modular series of minimalist compositions built on horizontal chromatic planes—each one echoing the desert’s natural architecture while exploring the emotional depth of color. Hastings had long used horizontal lines in his work, but in Chromatica, they took on new clarity. Gone were the props and performers. The focus shifted to a spare abstraction of landscape, allowing the work to adapt fluidly to square, panoramic, and narrow-strip formats without losing meaning or weight.

Each piece began as a pairing—two colors, one at the top, one at the bottom. Between them, a decision: how many planes? What rhythm of land and light? “It’s how I’ve broken down the Palm Springs experience,” Hastings explains. “Think of yourself standing in a backyard with your back to the house.” From that position, the environment unfolds in bands: patio, pool, garden, hedge or wall, desert, mountain, sky. These became the structural vocabulary for the entire series—seven possible layers, each grounded in place but shaped by feeling.

The first piece to take form was Morning Mist, rendered in a barely perceptible shift from teal blue to aqua green. Composed in three planes—pool, hedge, and sky—it captures the hush of early morning, when everything softens and light arrives gently. “That extreme minimalism in color gave me the cool morning vibe,” Hastings says. “It was exactly what I wanted: quiet, restrained, grounded.”

Originally envisioned as a set of six works following the traditional color wheel—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple—the series began to hint at something more expansive. “When I finished those six, I noticed a gap between the light blue I had chosen and the dark purple,” he says. That gap led to Infinite Blue, a single-plane composition where pool and sky merge seamlessly. A deep indigo field dissolves upward into diffused light, eliminating any boundary between water and air. “It’s a cool tonal anchor, but also an opening,” Hastings notes. “There’s no clear beginning or end.”

To accommodate such subtle transitions while staying within his two-color structure, Hastings worked with neighboring hues—analogous tones placed in tension. Sometimes they’re soft and powdery, other times saturated and royal. The results are emotional without being dramatic, architectural without being rigid.

Still, the series needed to signal its start. “When you use only adjacent colors, starting with true red doesn’t give you enough range,” he explains. “So I pulled from the end of the spectrum—used bright magenta right up top—to say, ‘Start here.’” That first piece becomes a chromatic handshake: a pulse of intensity that sets the entire prism arc in motion.

Although minimal in form, the series holds a dynamic interplay between structure and emotion. “The works themselves are quite still,” Hastings reflects. “A moment, a breath. But in today’s world of very short attention spans, I use the vivid colors to capture the viewer and pull them in—until they stop to breathe in the work.”

That pause is where Chromatica does its deepest work. It doesn't demand. It offers. A chromatic journey from red to violet, layer by layer, breath by breath.