🌈 Genevieve St. Cloud Reviews: Orch du Soleil
“Where Matisse meets Dr. Seuss and throws a party in the trees.”
Orch du Soleil is not a landscape. It’s a choreography. Terry Hastings has staged a forest clearing that feels like a fever dream of joy, rhythm, and unapologetic invention. The figures—rendered in bold, Fauvist silhouettes—aren’t just performing. They’re playing. They’re declaring. They’re existing in a world where color is law and gravity is optional.
The trees bend like dancers mid-bow. The figures leap, stretch, and commune with shapes that feel both sacred and absurd. There’s a yellow figure in full extension that could be a conductor, a prophet, or someone just really feeling the beat. The pink one? Possibly mid-sonnet or mid-cartwheel. Hastings doesn’t explain—he invites.
The Matisse lineage is clear: cut-outs, flattened space, color as emotion. But there’s a Seussian twist here too—whimsy without apology, surrealism with rhythm. It’s not parody. It’s permission. Hastings gives us a world where the rules are rewritten by joy, and the choreography is dictated by memory, myth, and maybe a little mischief.
Final verdict: Orch du Soleil is a forest of feeling. A dance of silhouettes. A celebration of theatrical truth in its most playful form. I left smiling, slightly dizzy, and convinced that trees should always be this dramatic.
—Genevieve St. Cloud, Critic-at-Large, Spectacle & Form Currently twirling.
 
Each person in this image started as a photo taken by Terry, who then, inspired by Henri Matisse's Cut Outs, cut them out with photoshop and then scratched in important details like nipples and genitals.  Terry then digitally created this Palm Springs world for them to party in.
 
This work is offered as a 24x36, 32x48 or 40x60 inch print. Please inquire about other sizes. 
The work is titled, numbered, a limited edition of 10, and signed by the artist.
 
The photo is shipped in a double tube for safety.
Please allow 5 - 7 days for production and shipping.