A Benton native has his artwork featured in New York City this week.
Terry R. Bean, a 1960 Benton High School graduate, will be featured at the International New York Art Expo 2009. Artwork is on display from Thursday to Monday at Jacob Javits Center.
Bean now lives in Little Rock
He recently returned from Shanghai, China, where he was invited to hang his oil paintings at the new Pudong Art Museum’s opening exhibit. His major 40-by-90 inch triptych “Ancient Music” featuring Ming Dynasty musical instruments and clothing worn by musicians will be on display in booth 512.
His next international exhibit will be at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland in October 2009, with the the theme, “An American artist goes to China.” It will feature work he’s created depicting three trips to China over the past five years visiting with mountain tribes.
“I am excited about taking a bite out of the Big Apple this year,” Bean said.
He noted he’s had a “long-term relationship” with New York City. It all started during his stint with the Army at a nearby Army post during the Vietnam War. That’s when he discovered the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The experience changed his life, he said, “by getting the creative juices flowing” toward his passion for art.
“My artwork is very much a reflection of my internal energy and intense life experiences,” he said. “I am able to express my spiritual heart through art. Time literally stands still while creating. It is the infinite ideas, sense of presence, visual kinesis and process of stretching my mind that I relish.”
Bean says he never knows where a particular work will take him. “This ebullient creative force comes out in so many surprising ways: emotive, moody or sensuous,” he said. “I don’t know the final outcome when I begin. A timeless intuition takes over and moves my brush onto the canvas.”
Bean’s artwork has won various competitive honors and is in permanent collection of several public institutions. Numerous private collections can be seen at his Web site, terrybean.com, Cantrell Gallery in Little Rock or Carolyn Taylor Gallery in Hot Springs.
Although he spends most of his time in Little Rock and a studio in West Palm Beach, Fla., Benton said he enjoys coming to Benton when he can and looks forward to participating in his school reunion this fall.
Bean moved to Benton when he was 9 and said it changed his life “dramatically.” He moved from St. Louis.
“Instead of city streets, there were deep woods and the free flowing Saline River,” he said.
Bean paid his own way through engineering school and the Master’s of Business Administration program at the University of Arkansas. During that time, he said he wrote a lot of “leisure time poetry, explored caves and was the editor of the ‘Arkansas Engineer’ magazine.”
After serving in the military, Bean took a job with Alcoa in Benton, where he and his late wife, Judith, started a family. During his career with Alcoa in the 1970s, he had the opportunity to travel to Europe, Asia and North America.
“It was during this world travel period that I got back in touch with my art side,” he said. “I was fortunate to be able to visit art museums like the Prado, Hermitage, Louvre, National Galleries in London and Washington, D.C., Metropolitan, National Palace Musuem in Taipei, Chicago Museum of Art, Ueno Museum in Tokyo and countless other fantastic museums.”
He retired from Alcoa after a 28-year career to care for his wife, who contracted terminal cancer.
“After the shock of her death, I re-evaluated my life and seriously took up art as a full-time position,” he said. “I went back to school as a studio art major and took many classes and workshops.”
Now, he said, his “personal playground includes sculpting, photography, drawing and painting.”
“I think my life experiences have prepared me for my artwork: sometimes sensuous, dark or beautiful. It is what I have experienced, inner-city childhood, military, death, divorce, but an overall fantastic life. It is what also drives my creativity side.”
|
Razorbacks
