Meet Terry (that’s me 😉)

My story of creative flow

An early encounter with a Robert Wyland’s Whaling Walls was all it took for me to start painting marine life. Even though my art education was focused on commercial graphic design, I started playing with oils and grew to love their ability to capture the richest colors and depth of nature. I had no clue what I was doing, but I figured it out by simply painting. Below are my early oil paintings (forgive the poor reproduction quality), sizes ranging from 24”x36” to 36”x48” on stretched canvas.

🌴 Florida, here I come 🩴🩴

One frigid January day as I was working on a sea turtle painting at home, it hit me. “What the heck am I doing in freakin’ Pittsburgh when I’m painting tropical seascapes and marine life?” I was in the wrong place. I packed my car, drove to Florida and never looked back.

After finding a job, I settled in Orlando and painted even more. I discovered Sunshine Artist magazine and learned about the outdoor art show circuit. My first outdoor art show was at the Clearwater Marine Science Center (now called the Clearwater Marine Aquarium because they needed to compete with Mote Marine Lab and Aquarium). To this day, both organizations are dedicated to rehabilitating injured, sick or orphaned Florida marine life.

I was such a first-timer I didn’t even have a festival tent—I’d created wooden frames to stand up my art for display. But I was thrilled, as it was the first time my paintings faced the public. On a side note, I later donated my two turtle paintings to the Clearwater Marine Aquarium—that was in 1991. 😳

Love of nature

Although my dad raised me in rural Pennsylvania on a small farm with Dorset sheep, black angus and some very intimidating geese, when I was around 15 he began snow-birding to our home in Marco Island, Florida.

I spent many years enjoying Marco with him. Some of my fondest memories are from times we fished together in the Ten Thousand Island backwaters. I never saw him happier than when he was on his little Whaler, cigar in hand, pole at the ready, looking for that perfect spot along the mangrove to cast his shrimp into the oyster beds the fish loved.

It was my dad’s appreciation of nature—especially Florida nature—that inspired my appreciation of it as well, and to call it my home as an adult. I was 28 when I moved to the sunshine state full time.

Showing outdoors

Shortly after that first art show in Clearwater, I started showing at outdoor art festivals all over Florida. I don’t know how artists do it every year as it was quite taxing hauling the artwork, setting up the booth each weekend, trying not to be affected by the adolescent comments of passersby, “Oh, I can paint that.” Sitting. Waiting. Enduring rainy days that thinned the crowds. And oh, the port-o-potties. Cringe.

My shows were sporadic weekend activities throughout the season as I still had a demanding job working for a large offset printing company, which is where I met my husband, Chuck. We began our life together and the painting took a backseat as we traveled, golfed, and worked at our careers side by side.

I did art shows a few more times, placed in a few juried shows, sold some paintings, but never really took to the outdoor art festival scene. In the third year of our marriage, Chuck was diagnosed with stage four melanoma. He passed away in 2004 after an ugly six-year battle with surgery, drugs, chemo and radiation.

It had been a tough couple of years for me. My dad had passed away three years earlier and my sister, Jane, two years earlier. The last thing I wanted to do was pick up a paint brush, so I put away my art, paint, brushes, easel, canvases and that was that. Painting came to a full stop for over twenty years.

The creative self-expression didn’t end there, however—it morphed into writing. After Chuck passed away, I wrote my first book. It was a memoir about our experience together—a love story. 14 Days - Loving Life with the Love of my Life, received a Writer’s Digest honorable mention in the non-fiction category.

I went on to write more and more and so far have written seven books, published six. The seventh was a fiction adventure—The Trojan Murders—that was an absolute blast to write, but I never published the completed draft. Maybe some day.

You can find my author page on Amazon here.

Fast forward to today

A blur of a year after Chuck passed away, I was part of a massive layoff at my Marriott corporate job. I’d been there six years leading the digital marketing team and it was my life raft of sanity after all the loss and grief I’d been through. So when that ended, I was faced with a big decision: find another corporate job or start my own business. I did the latter.

For nearly two decades now I have enjoyed the ups and downs of being self-employed. In 2021 I returned to painting to see what kind of painter I was; to see if I could resurface my love for seascapes and Florida nature.

As if dusting off an old hope chest in your parents’ attic, the love for nature, painting and expressing in my own way the beauty of Florida sea and sky was still there and hungry to be reopened and captured.

Now, in a high-tech world with artists’ selling their work online commonplace, I have joined fellow creative sellers to share and sell the work I’m doing today, complemented by professional coaching which I offered through my business and still enjoy delivering.

The 2023 shift

I went back to corporate. Yup. I’d gotten to a point in my career where I needed a big change and to make some creative runway. I was offered an opportunity to go full-time at one of my clients, CBRE, a large commercial real estate company that I’d been doing contract work with for about two years. The shift opened up a new opportunity: taking my painting to a whole new level.

And here we are.

If you’ve made it this far, I invite you to be a subscriber to my PappyClub Journal so we can stay in touch. I plan on sharing my life as I continue on this new journey—always coming back to where it all began: my innate creative flow.

With love, Terry. ❤️