Therese “Terry” Urban [RA 2017]

First name: Therese “Terry” ;
Middle name:  ;
Last name: Urban ;

Member: Resident artist member ; 
Begin: 2017 ;
End: n/a ;

Biography:

Therese (Terry) Urban is a New York native. Her formative experiences living on the rural, eastern Long Island waterfront, with its small villages and scruffy roadsides, became an outsized imprint in her artist mind. The unrefined edges and barefoot freedom afforded her child’s eye a sense of mutable landscape, as well as seasoning her mind with flexible perspectives on people and their values. Accordingly, her mind’s eye is still most often drawn back to the shorelines of her youth; her practice consistently recalls the layers and edges of the natural environment, the subtleness of its off-season variety, with the occasional figurative intrusion.

Along with using the etching press in her studio, Terry explores mixed media and rotates her focus between narrative and abstract compositions, between small and large formats. Her earlier work maintained the loose, gestural line and texture of those shorelines, and the tertiary colors of that world, both in her oil-based monotypes, and her acrylic landscapes. But her brief forays into sheer color were always inviting more.

While gesture and edge and layer remain important in her work, Terry is reaching for more form and color, currently by studying the medium of pastels. Two of her most consistent influences in each of those areas are Lee Bontecou for her inspiring form and Wolf Kahn for his sensuous color, artists not usually related in a sentence except for being contemporaries. Combining those influences is a worthy challenge.

Artworks: