The Hastings Gallery

​Today, I introduced AI with a number of pieces that I have done all dealing with "morning". Both the skies of sunrise and sunset have the possibility of magic in the colors. But you gotta wake up early for the chance of catching the morning magic. Remember, I'm an artist... So, I asked AI to create a 1000-word article about my interpretation of Morning.

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Before the Blue: Terry’s Language of Morning

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For Terry, morning is more than a time—it’s an atmosphere of possibility. It is not the blaze of sunrise, nor the comfort of full daylight, but the hushed sliver in between. Before the blue. Before narrative arrives. Before the figure steps into frame.

In a practice defined by both precision and openness, Terry approaches morning as both subject and collaborator. These works do not depict the light—they wait for it. They do not guarantee magic—they prepare for it, honor it, and—when it doesn’t arrive—respect its absence.

“Some days the magic happens, but not every day,” Terry says. This acknowledgment defines the tone of the series. The artist is not chasing spectacle; they are attending to presence. Morning here is not an event—it’s a temperament. Something to be entered quietly, not captured forcefully.

Color becomes the central architecture of this ephemeral world. In Morning Pool, bands of crimson, violet, and orange abstract a familiar setting into a chromatic memory: the red of reflected water, the purple of a perimeter wall, the warmth of a waking sun. These are not literal renderings. They are emotional transcriptions—a language of light and temperature shaped by Terry’s own rituals of attention.

Across works like Quiet Pool, Morning Reflection, and Morning Swim, the absence or presence of the figure becomes part of the syntax. Early compositions in the pool series held bodies—resting, reclining, composed within geometry. But even then, the figures were contemplative rather than narrative. They posed no question, offered no gesture. Their function was to inhabit, not to explain.

As the series shifts toward abstraction, the figures vanish entirely—but they are not erased. Their absence is intentional, resonant. “The lack of figure,” Terry notes, “represents the stillness and joy in mornings. The ability to just enjoy nature and the world in silence.”

This stillness is not void. It’s full of witnessing. Color stands in for presence. Shape becomes the residue of past occupancy. And in pieces like Morning Reflection, a crossover work between figural and abstract modes, Terry introduces structures—like the low trapezoidal form—that anchor memory without stating it outright. These elements feel like stages where something once happened, or may happen again.

Terry’s relationship to morning is as much about process as it is about perception. Waking early, scanning the sky, noticing the possibility of a shift—these are not just aesthetic acts. They are emotional commitments. There is risk in this kind of waiting: the light may never turn, the color may never bloom. Some mornings are cloudy. But the act of rising, of paying attention, becomes a kind of pact with the world.

This relationship is most clearly embodied in Joshua Morning. Here, Terry introduces the first natural form into their minimal landscapes—a solitary Joshua tree, standing quietly in the day’s earliest light. The gradient shifts through sun-warmed greens, golden neutrals, and a soft orange sky. The pool is gone. The architecture is gone. All that remains is the encounter: tree and light, viewer and moment.

The tree is not metaphor, not drama. It is witness. It stands for what Terry seeks in all these mornings: unscripted reverence. “Even when I do put the tree in a work,” Terry says, “it is solitary, like when I am alone enjoying a magical morning experience.” That solitary joy becomes the emotional underpinning of this work. It is not lonely. It is attuned.

What emerges across these pieces is not a singular vision of morning, but a vocabulary for it—spatial, tonal, and temporal. Terry resists over-naming. Their compositions offer stillness but leave interpretation open. They abstract without obscuring. They compose without insisting. Morning, in their hands, becomes not a destination, but a frequency—one that requires quiet to receive.

​And it is in this quiet that Terry’s work finds its most lasting resonance. As blue overtakes the sky, and the day unfolds into pattern and noise, something of that morning frequency lingers—inside the viewer, inside the frame. It reminds us that the world doesn't always offer magic. But it sometimes does. And when it does, it helps to be paying attention.