Terry Cooke Hall turns to her past to express the contemporary West
By Gussie Fauntleroy
This story was featured in the September 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art September 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.
SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN the campy mid-20th-century roadside attractions, the neon motel signs, and the glimpses of Native and Hispanic cultures that Terry Cooke Hall witnessed as a child during family road trips through the Southwest, she absorbed the colors, textures, and patterns that became embedded in her artist’s soul. Ten years later, in the mid-1970s, Andy Warhol and other pop artists were holding a dazzling mirror up to American culture just as Hall was immersed in studying art. In weekend and evening classes and workshops, she also studied with instructors who were steeped in the legacy of the Golden Age of illustration and in California Impressionism.
Now, like excavated treasure, Hall’s art has begun to reveal an aesthetic that feels familiar and true to her but was buried over the years by her passionate exploration of a range of artistic styles. In conversations during the past year with a friend well versed in art and design, it seems that something clicked in Hall, opening a gate to visual memories and inclinations from earlier periods in her life. She began shifting from a traditional mode of applying paint to a more clean-edged, graphic, even pop-art style, while sticking with the western, figurative subjects she has always loved. “I don’t know how it happened,” she says. “But I realized, oh my gosh, this is me!”
Among Hall’s first works in the series she calls The Modern West was GHOST HORSE. Simple in effect but complex in execution, the painting plays on positive and negative space with “just enough of an image to know what’s going on, but not too much,” she says. In it, three purple-hatted men stare into what we guess to be a rodeo arena, each man’s personality reflected in his body language and the suggestion of his focused gaze. “It was just so much fun, to give them that character and tell that story. It pulled out my illustration background,” she says. She’s referring to her 20-year career in hand-drawn graphic design and illustration for architects, land planners, landscape architects, and developers around Southern California. But her recent art also pulls out elements of visual inspiration that run even deeper than that.
SOME OF HALL’S earliest exposure to art, growing up in California’s Imperial Valley and in a small Texas Panhandle town, involved watching her mother paint as a hobby and her father occasionally sculpt figures in clay. While she has no memory of visiting art museums or galleries as a child, the 66-year-old artist vividly recalls being entranced by the creative illustrations in magazines, including hand-drawn ads. Her mother’s painting talent took a back seat to raising a family, but she signed Terry and her sister up for numerous classes in art, sewing, and other crafts. Hall’s father was a crop-duster pilot and later a test pilot and aircraft designer who traveled for his work. He brought back fascinating stories and artisan-made objects from around the world.
Most importantly, beginning as far back as memory takes her, Hall loved nothing more than to draw. With her emerging talent affirmed by high-school art teachers, she moved to San Diego following graduation. There she spent two decades working for companies planning large residential and commercial developments around Southern California. Her primary role was producing pen-and-ink illustrations for presentations, in the era before computer-aided drawing was the norm. “I was immersed in it. I was drawing constantly,” she says. Not only line and pattern for work, but on the side she drew amusing caricatures of friends and office mates. Even her boss requested caricatures of himself for such things as cards for promotional events. “That was fun,” she says. “It was not fine art, but I was drawing people all the time.”
Meanwhile, popular American culture was becoming immortalized in Warhol’s iconic imagery, and Hall was taking note. “When I was living in Texas in the mid-1960s, Elvis was popular, the Beatles were introduced to America, and of course there was JFK and Marilyn. Then in California I started seeing those images as Warhol reintroduced them. All those early billboards and magazine ads became pop art later on as well,” she says. Hall pauses and smiles as a train whistle punctuates her thoughts; tracks run close to her home and studio near Bozeman, MT. “We see America going by every day,” she says.
During her graphic-design career, Hall took art classes whenever she could fit them in, studying life drawing, illustration, airbrush, watercolor, and other mediums and modes. On her own she painted mostly in acrylics, finding herself intimidated by oils at the time. After leaving the development field in the mid-1990s, she cofounded and ran a San Diego-based business creating murals and faux finishes for high-end interior designers. Along the way, she passed on her love of art to her daughter, Whitney.
In 2005, Terry and Whitney signed up for an oil-painting course together at Palomar College in San Marcos, CA. It was a turning point for Hall. Studying under Michael Steirnagle, who in turn was influenced by painter Dan McCaw, she was especially influenced by these artists’ use of color. Inspired, she decided to leave the commercial field and focus on fine art. Three years later, the family moved to Montana. There, mother and daughter converted part of their home into a working and teaching space whose name, Cobalt Moose Art Studios, reflects the pair’s shared affinity for color. Today Whitney Michelle Hall is a professional artist with her own studio, while Terry continues to paint in the Cobalt Moose space with views of surrounding mountain ranges and visiting wildlife. “We had no idea a moose would actually christen our property the way he does,” she says, smiling.
For a number of years Hall’s representational figurative and still-life work featured rich color, often with a red underpainting that intensified its vibrant hues. Painted from her own photographs, her subjects were, and continue to be, inhabitants of the contemporary West: cowboys, Native Americans, and others who catch her eye. Many are Native women wearing regalia from their Northern Plains tribes, whom the artist meets and photographs at gatherings such as the annual Crow Native Days in southeastern Montana.
In these paintings, Hall alters the symbols on Native people’s clothing in order to honor but not appropriate their ceremonial and sacred cultural meaning. She often places the figures in front of a large half-orb of color, “to identify them as people of the sun,” she says. And she frequently summons her love of design in the backgrounds, sometimes incorporating mosaiclike patterns representing the sun, clouds, and sky.
Always, the women convey a sense of strength and confidence that Hall appreciates when she encounters it in women from all walks of life. “Women are often told they don’t have as much value as men, and this applies to all fields, even the creative field. I hope to be able to help younger women past that hurdle by overcoming misconceptions,” she says. “One of my hopes is to influence younger women that the world is available to them.”
While colorful representational expressions of the present-day West remain essential to Hall, she has recently seen her aesthetic take a new and exciting turn—back toward visual elements from her past. In particular she finds herself drawn once more to the Warhol era, as well as to quintessential Americana as viewed through station-wagon windows during childhood family trips.
Now, motivated by musings with her friend Alicia DeMers, owner of Ipséity Art Design in Bozeman, Hall has begun to translate these elements into stylized, pop-inspired art. As she follows her natural affinity for a strong graphic approach, she also often plays with a more selective use of color. In TAIL LIGHTS, three rodeo contestants face the setting sun as they wait their turns in the arena. The figures are rendered in strong contrast but only a handful of relatively muted hues. The piece exemplifies the painter’s lifelong fascination with the region she has always called home. “I love this subject because cowboys are classic—they are the West,” she says. “The working cowboy is everywhere, and this more modern version allows cowboys to transition into the contemporary world as who they are now.”
With her work itself transitioning into more contemporary forms, Hall has begun exploring nonobjective imagery as well. At a forthcoming exhibition that will be hosted by Ipséity Art Design in Bozeman, she’ll feature five large-scale abstract paintings in oil on translucent Mylar, hung from the ceiling. In addition, Hall’s GHOST HORSE has been reproduced in a 9-by-9-foot grid of limited-edition giclée prints in a series called Hot Sauce, all using the same image but in varying bright hues. Reflecting on the current direction of her work, Hall says, “I think pop art will always be with us because it’s a way to address our contemporary culture and who we are today in America. For me, I’m rediscovering my roots. I still enjoy softer brushwork and a less defined style, but this is really who I am.”
representation
Lovetts Gallery, Tulsa, OK; Mountain Trails Gallery, Park City, UT, and Jackson, WY; Tierney Fine Art, Bozeman, MT; Cobalt Moose Art Studios, Bozeman, MT; www.terrycookehall.com.
This story was featured in the September 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art September 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.
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