USU Eastern Press Release
A USU painting professor and two of his former students are displaying their work at USU Eastern’s Gallery East throughout October. The exhibit is titled “Colleagues and Co-creators: Christopher T. Terry, Scott Nelson Foster and Tyler Vance.”
The exhibit features landscape paintings by Terry, urbanscapes by Foster and mindscapes (or “skinscapes” as he calls them) by Vance. While the style of each of the artists is diverse, the images reflect their visions of the natural and sublime world around them.
All are depictions of the topography nature, the physical, the urban and the sublime. Collectively, these artists have a common alma mater, USU’s Department of Art, where they (as colleagues/students) exchanged their creative knowledge and experience. Individually, they are creators, conveying their visions of the tangible and not-so-tangible world.
Christopher T. Terry
Terry began teaching at USU in 1988 and is the recipient of numerous awards as a painter including the Utah Visual Artist Fellowship and a WESTAF/NEA Fellowship in Painting. He has twice been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship for Teaching and Research in Germany and, in 2000, was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome. He exhibits his paintings at galleries in the United States and Germany.
Although these paintings are a departure from the still life interiors he typically creates, Terry’s landscapes possess the same kind of quiet stillness that one would expect from his interior views. As he explains, “The central theme of my work is the ability of light to transform.” This transformative light plays a part in his landscapes as well.
“In particular, I find that the quality of light can be essential to building the sense of tension I want in my work. The quiet aspect of my paintings, as well as my frequent use of symmetry, would seem to undermine any tension, but I feel the silence present in the paintings suggests an anticipation: an event about to happen. Light contributes to this quality, but it is also enhanced by my dependence on visual information from my imagination and memory. Combining these strategies, I attempt to build a rhythm in my work that recalls the pace of ritual and dreams. Paradoxically, for a painter who is most often judged a ‘Realist,’ I find this rhythm comes more often from invention than from direct observation.”
Scott Nelson Foster
Foster works in a variety of two-dimensional media, including wax, glue and egg temperas, watercolor, oil, and serigraphy. His paintings have been featured in solo and juried exhibitions on the east and west coasts. He completed portraits commissioned by the St. Kateri Tekakwitha Parish and the Musician of Ma’alwyck. His interest in esoteric and unusual artistic practices has allowed him opportunities to work with iconographers, fresco painters, performance artists, and alchemists.
Foster received a B.A. in Fine Arst from Northwest Nazarene University and an M.F.A. in Painting and Drawing from USU. He paints and teaches at Siena College.
“My paintings are reflections of changing ideas about the societal relationships to the land, the American experience, and the American dream. The landscape is an arena in which many different dramas of the American dream are played out. Trailers, houses, and strip-malls evoke shared experiences. This common denominator gives my work a broad resonance that allows even fragmentary visions to evoke complex narratives. My watercolors and oils eschew the particulars—what makes a location unique—and focus on the iconic—what makes disparate subjects universal.”
“I create images that mimic photography—and photography’s implied veracity—that is not a photograph. My photorealistic paintings are created by piecing together images to create buildings and landscapes that do not necessarily exist in objective reality.”
Tyler Vance
Vance received his BFA from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City in 2006 and his MFA from USU in 2009. He continued to teach at USU as an adjunct faculty member until 2012.
He teaches drawing, painting, and art history at Assumption College and other institutions in central Massachusetts. He works out of his home studio where he lives with his wife, two kids and one chug.
“For these ‘intuitive’ drawings, I departed from my regular method of painting and drawing in favor of a more direct approach.”
Normally, I begin a painting with rigorous planning that involves preliminary sketches, studies, maquette-making, and photo shoots. For the ‘Annunciation’ series, however, there is no planning whatsoever; I simply put marks to the paper and as space and forms naturally appear, I develop them further. The drawing may change drastically from start to finish, as shapes combine and separate while the composition unfolds. I found this process to be refreshing, energetic and fulfilling.”
This exhibit is part of USU Eastern’s Year of the Arts, a celebration of the arts at each of USU’s campuses from 2017-18.
Athough Foster and Vance will not be able to attend, a reception and gallery talk will be held on Nov. 2 from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. where Professor Terry will discuss his creative process. Students, family and the community are invited to attend the reception and/or gallery during the academic year from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admittance into the gallery is free and open to the public.
Questions can be answered by Noel Carmack, Gallery East curator, at (435) 613-5241 or email at noel.carmack@usu.edu.
