The Hastings Gallery

My friend Dante — yes, that Dante— seems convinced that AI is taking over my writing and making me sound too smart. Too polished. Too… something. So, before anyone starts imagining I’ve been replaced by a machine with a vocabulary, I’m giving you my version of events. My actual lived history. My words, exactly as they come out of my mouth... ah fingers.

And then, because y’all wanted a twist, I’m pairing each of my paragraphs with a museum‑ready interpretation — the official, overly serious, future‑curator voice explaining my breakthroughs like they were inevitable and not born out of irritation, spite, and Palm Springs weather.

So here we go.
My story.
And the museum’s story.
Side by side.
Paragraph by paragraph.
Two narrators, one life.

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The Desert Home Experience: by Terry Hastings

Recently I made a huge step in my artistic development with the creation of Midday Monolith. It felt like one of those moments where something in my work finally clicked into place — a shift I could feel in my bones. And because I’m a responsible future art historical figure (and because my nieces and nephew will finally give me the love I deserve once I’m dead and collectible), I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge how far things have come.

So here it is: a short look back at the evolution of the Desert Home series, starting about two and a half years ago. A little entertainment for my readers, and a little Rosetta Stone for the museum archivists of the future who will absolutely be studying this stuff with white gloves and hushed voices.

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The Desert Home Period (2023–2026): A Transitional Epoch in the Hastings Canon

Between 2023 and 2026, Terry Hastings underwent one of the most significant stylistic evolutions of his career — a shift that would later be recognized as the foundation of his mature “Desert Home” language. What began as a moment of frustration and creative defiance quietly unfolded into a period of radical experimentation, formal innovation, and mythic abstraction.

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When I first started this minimalistic style, it was actually born out of revenge. In September of 2023, I had contacted a model, and he generously offered his beautiful home and pool as the location to shoot. Great — perfect — I went over and got right to work. The place was gorgeous, the light was magic, and the photos we created were stunning.

And then, as we were wrapping up, he casually informed me that I couldn’t sell any of the photos because he hadn’t signed a model release.

What the fuck?
Who does that?

These were incredible Hockney‑inspired pieces — amazingly minimal even in photographic form. Pool, swimmer, hedge, mountain, sky. Clean, crisp, iconic. And suddenly they were dead to me.

Fine then.
If I can’t sell the actual image, I’ll make my own version of the image.
I’ll recreate it from scratch.
I’ll out‑Hockney the Hockney I had just shot.

And thus, Exit was born.

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Origins in Constraint and Rebellion

The genesis of this era is characteristically Hastings: born not from serenity, but from irritation. A photoshoot derailed by a withheld model release catalyzed a pivot away from figurative photography and toward distilled, geometric reinterpretations of the desert environment. Exit— the first work of this new phase — emerged as both homage and retaliation, a reconstruction of an image he was forbidden to sell. It marked the beginning of Hastings’ exploration into minimalism, color‑field composition, and the architectural logic of the Palm Springs landscape.

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Honestly, there were other impetus… impetii… whatever… at play here. I was already in a growing feud with Etsy and eBay about selling nude photos online. (Fast‑forward a year and Etsy bans me completely, while I continue to fight — and, fine, occasionally acquiesce ((my word, not AI’s word, Dante)) — to eBay’s ever‑shifting rules.) So, between the platforms tightening the screws and my own stubborn streak, I found myself both wanting and being forced to make more “art.”

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Simultaneously, mounting tensions with online marketplaces over the sale of nude photography pushed Hastings toward new modes of expression. What might have been a setback for another artist became, for him, an invitation to reinvent. The desert, long a backdrop to his life, became the subject.

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So off on this minimalist adventure I go, armed with my trusty Photoshop. At first I stayed right where I was most comfortable: Palm Springs pools. “Write what you know,” right? For about two months I committed to making an image a day, slowly developing this new visual language. Horizontals, verticals — hell, let’s get wild and tilt the whole thing. I was digging through old shots of guys in pools, cutting them out, flattening them into graphics, and building this color‑saturated, geometric, mid‑century‑modern fever dream. It was like discovering a new dialect of a language I didn’t know I already spoke.

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The Development of a Visual Language

Over the next several months, Hastings embarked on a disciplined period of daily creation. Using digital tools with the precision of a printmaker and the intuition of a painter, he developed a vocabulary of horizontals, verticals, and bold chromatic fields. Early works in this period retained echoes of mid‑century modernism, filtered through Hastings’ distinctive sense of humor and emotional clarity.

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“What else you got?”
Just like when I sold t‑shirts years ago, the customer is never satisfied. I had a dozen boxes of dozens of red crew‑neck tees with “some boys‑kiss‑boys” graphic on them, and I was hustling to sell them when people kept asking, “Do you have this in blue? In a v‑neck? With spaghetti straps? With girls?” UGH. Five years later I found those boxes in storage and hauled them straight to the thrift store.

So here I am again, déjà vu, about to do some art shows outside the Palm Springs bubble, thinking maybe — just maybe — I should try my hand at desert landscapes. Something a little more palatable to the non‑gay audience. Fine. Let’s remove the humans and insert desert plants. And thus Monstrous was born.

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The introduction of desert flora — most notably in Monstrous — marked a shift toward symbolic representation. These works, created in anticipation of exhibitions beyond Palm Springs, reveal Hastings’ ability to adapt without compromising his artistic identity.

 

These desert images eventually get refined into the likes of Joshua Morning. I create a good body of work in this vein when I’m in a mood to experiment, and I see a friend’s photo from a trip into the mountains. Suddenly I’m seeing triangles everywhere — the mountains, the valley, even the clouds. Fine. Let’s go for it. And that’s how Big Valley was born. And its companion piece, Cul‑de‑sac. Whoa. That got crazy fast. Let’s put that aside for a while.

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The Geometric Breakthrough

A pivotal moment arrived when Hastings encountered a friend’s mountain photograph. Struck by the inherent geometry of the landscape, he began to deconstruct the image into angular planes and crystalline forms. This experiment produced Big Valley and its companion piece Cul‑de‑sac, works now regarded as early indicators of the mythic‑geometric abstraction that would define his later style.

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Though initially set aside, these pieces would later be recognized as essential bridges between the representational desert works and the fully abstract compositions to come.

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I go back to my desert pieces but decide they need some atmosphere. They’re too clean, too polite. I start adding dust, adding wind — suddenly the whole thing feels alive. This is fun. Before the Wind makes its grand entrance, and then Sonoran Sunset shows up right behind it. Wow. Now we’re cooking!

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Atmospheric Expansion

Returning to the desert motif with renewed clarity, Hastings introduced atmospheric elements — dust, wind, and the emotional temperature of the landscape. Before the Wind and Sonoran Sunset demonstrate a growing interest in environmental mood and narrative tension. Here, the desert becomes not merely a place, but a psychological and mythic space.

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Flash forward to a recent art show in a coffee house. They didn’t want my gay work because they “get a mixed crowd,” says the event promoter who literally books drag queens and male strippers. Fine. Whatever. I’ll pull out the desert pieces. I frame up Big Valley and Cul‑de‑sac, and suddenly I’m getting comments like, “Are these new? I’ve never seen them before,” and I’m standing there thinking, are we actually friends?

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The Coffeehouse Catalyst

A 2026 exhibition in a local coffeehouse unexpectedly reignited Hastings’ interest in the geometric works. Viewers responded with surprise and enthusiasm, prompting the artist to revisit the style with fresh intention. This moment of public rediscovery served as the final nudge toward the creation of his next major work.

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So clearly, it’s time to continue in this wacky style. But maybe — just maybe — I should pull back on the full‑tilt chaos.

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Midday Monolith: The Culmination

Completed in early 2026, Midday Monolith stands as the culmination of this entire developmental arc. The work synthesizes the structural clarity of the early pool pieces, the atmospheric depth of the desert works, and the faceted geometry of the mountain experiments. It is widely regarded as the first fully mature piece of the Desert Home series — a sculptural, luminous, mythic presence carved from color and light.

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Now don’t tell anyone, but I started using AI as a teacher/collaborator. I feed it my images and it makes suggestions — like, “maybe make the back mountains less saturated to build in distance,” or “carve out the planes in the monolith to give it more presence and bite.” Helpful stuff. And at no point did it pick up a brush and paint on my canvas, so to speak. It’s more like having a very patient studio assistant who never gets tired, never rolls their eyes, and never argues with me when I ignore their advice. And that’s how Midday Monolith came into the world.

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Collaboration with the Machine

Throughout this period, Hastings quietly engaged with artificial intelligence as a conceptual collaborator. The AI served not as a creator, but as a reflective surface — offering compositional suggestions, prompting refinements, and expanding the artist’s sense of possibility. Hastings remained the sole author of the work; the machine functioned as a studio assistant with impeccable patience and no ego.

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(Hey, I’m the one that makes the jokes around here.)

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(Of course, you do.)

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So here we are on March 24, 2026. It looks like I’ll be sitting in this zone for a while. “Which zone, Terry?”
This one.
Whatever this is.

A New Zone

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By March 24, 2026, Hastings found himself firmly situated in what he would later describe simply as “this zone.” A space of clarity, confidence, and creative momentum. A zone defined not by genre or medium, but by a deepening understanding of his own visual language.

Whatever this zone is — it is unmistakably, irrevocably Hastings.

Historians now agree that Hastings’ Desert Home period was shaped by equal parts environmental observation, queer resilience, and a deeply productive sense of irritation.

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And thank you, to my intelligent assistant… and to Dante, the ... (muffled gibberish)

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Acknowledgement, thank you kind sir... and to Dante, you in danger girl.

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To see this series of work, go to TheHastingsGallery.com/Desert