story by LESLIE SILVERMAN
Dick Termes is not your usual artist . Nor is his gallery where he displays his one of a kind Termespheres .
The geodesic dome space on Christensen Drive in Spearfish immediately draws you in as your head tilts up , your eyes wondering what to look at first .
The Termespheres , hung from the ceiling and spinning with the aid of a motor , are visually intriguing in their variety of shapes and sizes . Once you adjust and begin to take in the patterns , paints , portraits and pictures each one displays , questions emerge . The how questions - how is this possible , how did he paint this , and how did he come up with this idea ?
As well as the what questions - what story does that one over there tell and what exactly is on that one up there ?
Each one takes several moments to try to understand , and marvel at .
Meeting the artist himself is just as surreal . He is unique both in how he thinks and in his talent for his craft .
“ Most of the stuff comes out of my head ,” Termes says about the spheres he creates . Most begin with the ball themselves , the medium in which he works . Then he asks himself “ what am I going to put on it ?”
He uses pure perspective to create pieces , to see what kind of world he can create .
Some of his designs are realistic and come from places he ’ s visited like Notre Dame or the Pantheon in Rome . Some come out of geometrical studies he does about the sphere .
Others are simply coming from the space in his head , letting his thoughts unfold .
” I do a lot of spheres where I play with letting whatever happens happen , without thinking about it ,” he said . This creates anything from geometric patterns to weird creatures to “ lots of very strange stuff .”
Termes traces the beginning of his work with spheres to when he took his first class in perspective in 7th grade , explaining the work he now creates is a very advanced form of that basic concept .
He was brought to the world of the sphere by trying to expand his work on canvas , playing with panoramas but missing something .
“ If you ’ re in a great cathedral you don ’ t get the top or the bottom in a painting ,” he said . During his studies he was encouraged by professors and peers alike to have a fresh idea in the arts , one that other people didn ’ t do , and to have a good reason as to why he was doing it .
“ I decided where I ' d had my best luck was in teaching perspective , and I ’ d been teaching it with quite a bit of grid systems instead of projection points ,” he said .
Termes thought back to one of his toughest teaching experiences , teaching elementary art in Sheridan , Wyoming , pushing a “ little buggy ” to 27 different classes .
“ What the teaching of the elementary taught me was simplify , simplify , simplify . Take the concepts and get them down to the simplest level you can with elementary kids and when they create something they ’ re actually building toward these bigger concepts ,” he said .
He took that lesson and applied it to his own work on perspective , taking a complicated idea and figuring out a grid system to help him . From there “ it kind of exploded ” extending from onepoint perspective all the way to six-point perspective .
“ As you add more points in perspective you get more space in which to create . Pretty soon I was up to all the ways to think about 6 point .”
That ’ s when someone said to him that his art looked like a ball . “ So I thought ‘ a ball .’ I put myself inside of the ball and thought about north , south , east , west , up and down . Would that fit on a ball , I asked myself ? What would it look like ?”
He created one of his first pieces , which he began to cleverly refer to as Termespheres , on an old foam squish ball .
“ Everything worked . It was like one of those lightbulb moments so I was pretty excited about that ,” he said .
His first spheres were created with oil paints but Dick soon switched to acrylic paints because he found oil took too long to dry . Most of his Termespheres are now on polyethylene plastic that requires no structure , although the transparent ones he creates are acrylic .
Termes had presumed many people had been playing in this world of spheres but found that , in fact , he was doing exactly what his professors and peers had challenged him to do , working in a domain no one else had ever worked .
“ What I ’ ve learned about the sphere is that it speaks a different language than the flat surface ,” he said . “ The kinds of stuff it wants to talk about is different . The geometry of the sphere is totally different from Euclidean geometry . No one had been playing in that area at all .”
Termes has now had a very successful career painting on spheres , exploring what he can do . His Termespheres can be seen all over the world . In the Black Hills area , Termes has a teepee-inspired piece that hangs in the common area of the Little Wound School . He created the historical concept piece by working with the community as well as students from the school .
“ We ended up blowing this up 8 feet tall ,” he says gesturing to a similar , smaller version that hangs in his gallery .” The kids did a really good job ,” with one child adding the idea of putting the school itself in the piece .
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