The Hastings Gallery

Long before TikTok crowned its first influencer, artists like me were shaped by quieter forces, museums, gallery afternoons, and the oversized coffee table books that lived in our homes like silent tutors. My influences didn’t arrive as trends; they accumulated slowly, sloshing around in my head for decades until they became part of my visual DNA. And lately, I’ve noticed it’s getting harder to pull names and dates out of the punchbowl of my brain, so I think it best to get these memories down now. What follows is a list of the artists whose colors, shapes, and emotional architectures have stayed with me the longest, shaping how I see and how I make.

Henri Matisse is the granddad of all things color and minimal. The original wizard who proved that joy could be engineered through shape alone. His early Fauvist works were my first real permission slip to let color misbehave, and I’ve quoted La Danse and The Joy of Life more times than I care to admit. Those paintings aren’t just references; they’re part of my internal operating system. And then there are the cut outs, specifically Blue Nude, which is basically ground zero Terry. That single figure, reduced to pure shape and pure emotion, taught me that you can strip everything away and still say everything that matters. Matisse didn’t just influence me; he rewired me.

While we’re lingering in turn of the century France, I have to tip my hat to Georges Braque, the quieter but more colorful half of Cubism, the one who actually set the standards for how I build my photocollages. His Cubist still lifes were basically the blueprint for my piano works. I took the subject matter he and Picasso kept circling: wine, food, sheet music, bottles, guitars, scraps of paper and interpolated them from paint into photography. It wasn’t imitation; it was translation. I saw the Braque/Picasso exhibition at MoMA in 1996, and even though I remember the six hundred triangular olive green bottles and guitars Picasso churned out, it was Braque’s colorful Cubist works that stirred me. He was the one who made fragmentation feel lyrical, who made geometry feel intimate. Braque didn’t just influence my collages, he gave them their internal logic.

My first real encounter with a major Rothko was almost certainly at the Met, one of those enormous, breathing color fields that rearranges your internal weather just by standing in front of it. Rothko is the artist who taught me that color isn’t just something you use; it’s something you enter. His floating rectangles, his atmospheric gradients, his quiet insistence that emotion can be built out of nothing but hue and edge. All of that seeped into me long before I ever digitized a horizon. I’ve seen Rothkos in plenty of museums since, but that early experience of being swallowed by a single field of color is the one that stuck. Rothko showed me that simplicity can be seismic, that a painting can hum at the same frequency as a human being. My own skies, my bands of twilight, my emotional geometry, they all owe a debt to that moment when I realized color could be a place.

Let’s stay in New York and walk over to the Whitney for the Frank Stella retrospective, This is the one that basically sandblasted my brain. The early hard edge works. The ones that hum. My good friend David took me all over the New York museum world, many times, and I am eternally grateful for his persistence. He made me sit in front of the Stella pieces and stare at them until the stripes started to blend together and vibrate like some kind of optical mantra. That’s when I understood Stella: not as theory, not as minimalism, but as rhythm, pure, graphic rhythm. Those stripes became part of my internal metronome, the thing that still guides how I build horizons, gradients, and the quiet architecture of my compositions. 

And then, on the floor above the Stella retrospective at the Whitney, everything shifted, again. I walked into the Archibald J. Motley Jr. exhibition and was immediately shaken by the boldest use of color I’d ever seen in representational painting. The purples, the greens, the oranges — colors that should have clashed but instead danced, strutted, and glowed with the electricity of Harlem nightlife. Motley showed me that realism didn’t have to be polite; it could be theatrical, neon, unapologetically alive. After staring at Stella’s stripes until they vibrated, Motley’s world felt like stepping into a jazz chord — saturated, syncopated, and utterly confident. His palette cracked something open in me. It was the moment I realized that color could tell the story and set the mood, that representation could be just as chromatically fearless as abstraction. Motley didn’t just influence me; he gave me permission to be loud.

As we were leaving the Motley exhibition at the Whitney, I did a double take — did I just see my neighbor Agnes Pelton hanging on the wall? Two of her works, glowing like quiet spiritual beacons, right there in New York. The home she lived in for most of her life is three blocks from where I live now in beautiful Cathedral City, CA, and five years ago both the Whitney and my hometown museum in Palm Springs mounted a major retrospective of her work. I remember standing in front of one of her radiant, lined paintings: all color, all spirit, all inner glow, when a woman beside me asked why there were so many paintings of palm trees hanging next to Pelton’s work. Without missing a beat, I said, “That was her day job.”
Pelton has always felt less like an influence and more like a presence — a desert mystic whose visual language overlaps with mine in ways that feel more psychological than stylistic. Her gradients, her spiritual geometry, her belief that the desert is a mirror: all of that hums in the background of my own work. She’s not just in the museums I visit; she’s in my neighborhood, in my landscape, in the air I breathe.

Speaking of neighborhoods, Grant Wood has always felt like a regional cousin. He was in Iowa, I grew up in Minnesota, and the emotional weather of those two places is basically the same. His rolling hills, his sculpted farmland, his carved out Americana all seeped into me long before I ever knew his name. Wood painted the Midwest the way it actually feels: orderly, rhythmic, slightly surreal, and full of quiet drama. When I look at his landscapes now, I see the same visual logic that shaped my childhood: the long horizons, the stacked fields, the sense that the land itself has a personality. I didn’t realize until much later how much of that geometry and calm intensity had lodged itself in my brain. Wood wasn’t just painting Iowa; he was painting the emotional architecture of the entire Upper Midwest, and I carried that with me all the way to the desert.

Continuing with farmland, Andrew Wyeth was the one who taught me that open fields could hold entire emotional biographies. Where Grant Wood gave the Midwest its sculptural rhythm, Wyeth gave rural America its interior life — the silence, the distance, the ache. His landscapes and figures always felt like they were caught between seasons, between thoughts, between breaths. Growing up in Minnesota, I understood that feeling instinctively: the long stretches of land, the muted palette, the sense that the horizon was both a boundary and an invitation. Wyeth painted restraint with such intensity that it became its own kind of drama. His fields weren’t just fields; they were states of mind. And somewhere in my own work — in the quiet spaces, the held breaths, the emotional weather — there’s always a little Wyeth lingering in the background.

As honorable mentions, Georgia O’Keeffe, Milton Avery, and Richard Diebenkorn: the desert auntie, the poet of simplification, and the cartographer of emotional space. O’Keeffe taught me that a landscape can be distilled into spiritual geometry; Avery showed me that restraint can glow, that a few softened shapes can hold an entire mood; and Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings revealed how structure and atmosphere can coexist, how a canvas can feel like both a map and a breeze. Together, they shaped my understanding of color, place, and emotional clarity — not loudly, but steadily, like three different kinds of weather moving through the same sky.

And finally, what you’ve all been waiting for: David Hockney. When I moved to California, there was a pool ten steps outside my apartment and I had easy access to hot models. Done. That’s the photography, that part is easy to recognize. Sunlight, water, bodies, color. It was practically a Hockney starter kit. But Pearblossom Highway… now that’s tasty. That’s the one that cracked me open. That’s the moment I dove headfirst into photocollage, realizing you could take a place, fracture it, reassemble it, and somehow make it feel more real than a single photograph ever could. Hockney didn’t just influence me; he gave me a method, a permission slip, and a whole new way of seeing. He’s the visual parent I claim without hesitation, the one who taught me that space can be elastic, that color can be narrative, and that the world is always more interesting when you break it apart and put it back together on your own terms.

And once I got tired of all that maximalism, the pools, the bodies, the sun drenched everything, it was time for some Hockney inspired minimalism. Digital Minimalism. I can’t paint worth beans, but I can absolutely figure out how to make you see what I see using a combination of photography and digital art. Color and character. That’s the sweet spot. Hockney showed me that you can strip an image down to its essentials and still make it sing, that clarity can be just as seductive as complexity.

All these artists, the loud ones, the quiet ones, the neighbors, the giants, have been sloshing around in the punchbowl of my brain for decades, bumping into each other, dissolving, reforming, and flavoring everything I make. None of it was linear, none of it arrived on schedule, and none of it felt like “influence” at the time; it was just the slow accumulation of color, rhythm, geometry, and emotional weather that eventually settled into my own way of seeing. What I create now is a distilled version of that lifelong slosh. Photography and digital art shaped by painters, sculptors, mystics, minimalists, maximalists, and one very persuasive Englishman with a swimming pool. If there’s any clarity in my work today, it’s only because I finally stopped trying to chaperone the punchbowl and let everyone spike it at will, letting all those intoxicating flavors swirl into something unmistakably mine.