Romancing the West
By Patricia O’Connor

You needn’t worry that such an analogy would go to Terry’s head. He might have been a precocious child, but he is a humble adult, in spite of his many accomplishments. Terry won his first art award at age 9, received a commission to paint late president Lyndon B. Johnson’s portrait in 1976, and has his work collected by the likes of Burt Reynolds, Travis Tritt, Dick Clark, Exxon, and Anheuser-Busch.

Some years, the industrious Terry holds more than two dozen one-man shows and signings throughout the country. Such is evidence that the man doesn’t rest, especially not on his laurels. In addition, he and his wife and business partner, Mary, established Jack Terry Fine Art Publishing in 1992, making limited edition prints of his original oils available in 300 outlets all over the world.

But, if you were to ask Terry about his talents, he would say, "Ma’am," in his polite Southern manner, "I think the greatest gift I have is hard work. I’m really not that great an artist. I have to work really hard at what I do."

Considerable talent aside, Terry might well be the hardest working man in the art business today. On his small ranch in Kerrville, Texas, he rises with the dawn, then feeds the horses and cows and the exotic deer he raises for venison, before entering his studio to sign prints. By 8 or 8:30 a.m., Terry is at his easel, painting images that move him: cowboys riding with the late afternoon sun at their backs, Victorian ladies inspecting flower gardens, a turn-of-the-century country family leaving church on a snowy Christmas Eve. Sometimes, he will have four or five paintings going at once. He often paints until six, when other ranching duties call. After dinner with Mary, he settles in for a quiet night of sketching and researching paintings for the next day.

Hard work aside, many say Terry has it easy. Despite his humility, he has never failed at any artistic endeavor he’s undertaken. He won 132 awards before he even graduated from high school. He studied one-on-one with some of the biggest names in Western art. He has earned commissions and acquired collectors without ever having to promote himself. Still, Terry takes little credit for his good fortune. "I’m a Christian," he says. "I believe by faith that I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing." His job, as he sees it, is to work hard and be ready. The rest, at least in his case, seems to take care of itself.

You’ve heard the adage, "When the student is ready, the teacher will come." Well, Terry must have been born ready. A fourth-generation Texan, and proud of it, Terry’s maternal grandfather was a rancher and cowboy, who rode on some of the last great cattledrives in the West. Terry has since committed to canvas many of the stories his grandfather shared with him.

Terry’s paternal grandmother, a painter who recorded the world around her, from the weathered face of an old cowboy to images of her husband’s cotton gins, was the first to inspire him to make art. Terry was just 3, when he sat at his grandmother’s knee, drawing alongside her with crayons and paper.

Terry’s parents realized early on that there was something special about their son and sent him to study with a local artist, who managed to interest the energetic young boy in drawing still lifes. By the time he was 9, Terry’s teacher and parents agreed that he was ready to enter his artwork in the Scurry County Fair. To everyone’s surprise, he won First Place. That was the beginning of a long line of winning streaks for Terry.

"Over the next four or five years, I entered everything, and I won everything," he says. By the time Terry was 16, he had won 132 awards in every category from still lifes to landscapes to Western art, the subject that quickly was becoming his real passion.

At each stage of his development, it seemed another teacher appeared. Terry was only 12, when Dalhart Windberg, a judge at one of the aforementioned competitions, decided to take Terry under his wing. Every day after school for three years, mentor and student explored the elements of a painting that draw a viewer’s eye into the scene. Windberg impressed on Terry the techniques used by European masters to wield light and shadow around a central theme, to capture elements in nearly photographic detail.

There was never any question in Terry’s mind that he’d be a professional artist, but at the University of Texas, he majored in journalism and minored in art. "I really didn’t have any plans to be a journalist," he says, "It was just a fall-back." As it turns out, Terry’s real education had less to do with college than with being at the right place at the right time.

Austin in the early 1970s was to painters what Paris in the 1920s was to writers. Oil money flowed, and patrons were generous. Creative minds congregated to share ideas and techniques, ala Hemingway and Stein, at local galleries.

Terry was only 18 and still green behind the ears, when he walked into one such gallery. The owner saw Terry’s potential and set him up with Melvin Warren.

Warren, an established artist, generously offered to help young Terry master anatomy, both human and equine, in paint. James Boren later helped him become proficient at perspective, and Porfiriou Salinas gave him landscape pointers. Edouard Cortes also had a big influence on Terry, who was fascinated by the way Cortes captured light in his European street scenes. Terry began to paint street scenes of his own, setting his scenes in oil boom towns, complete with images of old movie theaters and mom and pop storefronts.

When he wasn’t studying techniques with other artists, Terry studied his subjects with other cowboys. He grew up around the working ranch hand, thanks to his cowboying grandfather. Whenever he can, he still likes to visit ranches, work alongside the cowboys, and snap a few pictures for inspiration. There are fewer ranches in operation today than there were when he was a young buck but, back then, everything seemed to fall into place.

A case in point was when the State of Texas commissioned Terry to paint a portrait of Lyndon B. Johnson for its bicentennial calendar, an honor that brought with it increased recognition. Terry was invited to put on a one-man show at the state capitol rotunda and, before he knew it, he was named Bicentennial Artist of Texas.

The same year, Terry opened his own gallery, the Cotten-Terry Gallery, in Austin. The good times couldn’t last forever, however, and by the late 1970s, the oil money all but dried up. The gallery closed in 1979, but Terry was resourceful. He realized that he had to cater to the female collector, as well as the male, and began painting Victorian women. The images and the price tags weren’t as grandiose as those for his Westerns, but they sold. "That’s what I did instead of taking a journalism job," Terry says.

You might think it’s quite a stretch to go from painting cowboys on the trail to Victorian ladies on the garden path. For Terry, who has long been accused of being a romantic painter, the two themes aren’t that dissimilar. "Romance is about the use of light and shadows," he says. "Two people can paint the same subject, but the lighting in the painting can make it either warm and romantic and inviting or stark and cold. Part of the job of an artist is to do what a photographer can’t do with light: set a romantic mood."

As for romancing the West, Terry is guilty as charged, not because he paints the cowboy’s world as something it’s not. "To me, it’s very real," he says. "I don’t see much sense in painting the droughts and the starving and the freezing cattle. I tend to focus on the positive. I paint what I enjoy about the Western life."

Often, what Terry enjoys is telling a story, the way his grandfather did, about cattle drives and cowboys riding through mystic canyons or raging rivers. Sometimes, he takes historical license and paints cowboys galloping beside stagecoaches, or San Francisco city scenes circa 1880. Very often, the most compelling character, regardless of the setting, is the weather. "You don’t realize, until you’re out of the house, with no roof over your head [how important the environment is]," he says. "You realize your priorities change real quickly."

That Terry has made his way through the art world so successfully, without becoming more of a businessman, is remarkable. Good fortune just seems to find him, as do collectors. In 1991, for example, friends introduced him to then-Texas governor Ann Richards, who had her eye on a particular painting by Terry: After the Centennial Parade, an Austin city street scene where horses and riders of bygone days mingle with streetcars, while the state capitol stands tall in the distance. Terry presented the painting, on loan, to Richards at a formal dinner, and it hung in the rotunda until she left office. Terry currently is working on a painting that will be presented to former President George Bush at the dedication of his library at Texas A & M University.

Mary handles the business end of Terry’s art, including Jack Terry Fine Art Publishing, leaving him time to focus on supplying his galleries-from Austin to Aspen and Santa Fe to Dallas-with original work. "I can’t seem to get enough painting done to keep everyone happy," Terry says.

The important thing is that he is happy, happy to be painting and happy to be ranching. As Terry has said more than once, "I am blessed."

Patricia O’Connor is a writer living in Steilacoom, Washington.

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Early Snow, oil, 20" by 24"

“The aspens were still changing colors at my friend's ranch in southern Colorado near the Continental Divide, when we gathered cattle from the mountains in preparation for winter. We awoke one morning in the line shack to several inches of new snow. It was a beautiful sight and inspired this painting.”

The Chase, oil, 20" by 30"

“While driving through New Mexico near sunset one summer, I saw a cowboy chasing the horses through the chamisa. It was a dynamic scene, as the figures were silhouetted against the setting sun. I took the liberty of adding the bold of lightning, which I witnessed later that same evening.”