Richard Terrill Information

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What follows is a brief life story of Richard Terrill, pretty much taken from his own words. Take a little time to read about this remarkable journey into the world of self-taught art.

Richard was born in Baltimore (10/15/44) and has lived there since 1970, both of these circumstances were a matter of chance rather than design. Richard was born in Baltimore because his father was in the army stationed near there. Soon after, Richard’s mother moved back with him to her home town, a coal patch called Walkertown in southwestern Pennsylvania. She was a coal miner’s daughter and granddaughter. Richard also wanted to work in the mines. His father, however, was an industrial worker from Pittsburgh, so it was away from the coal patch to the first of many homes in a wide range of American environments: city life, suburban life, small town life, back now again to city life.

For the most part, Richard’s life has been unremarkable. However, there were those experiences – which all humans have the potential to experience and grow from – that, helped him develop his artistic side. Richard worked as a driving instructor and private detective while still a teenager to help pay college expenses. He attended public college in Pennsylvania (Clarion) and later Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He spent some time teaching in city schools in Pittsburgh and in the suburbs, but decided to hitchhike to California in 1969 and become a Zen monk. This led to the first of the two more remarkable experiences which have contributed to his art.

While in California, and after returning a few months later to Pittsburgh, Richard had a number of telepathic experiences. These experiences are difficult to describe. Richard describes telepathy as being on a more emotional level, rather than "mind reading". Rather than being entirely enlightening, however, these experiences with other individuals similarly led Richard to try to "figure it out" rather than trying to just integrate the experience.

Leaving Pittsburgh behind, Richard ended up in Baltimore, again not by design. In addition to teaching English at the men and women’s maximum security prisons in Jessup and Baltimore, Richard has been a teacher in the inner city since 1970. The telepathic experiences’ emotional impact faded more and more, until Richard’s best buddy and fellow telepath Greg Serafine died in 1979.

Greg stayed alive (he was dying from non-Hodgkin’s cancer) that final day until Richard could reach his bedside in Pittsburgh. Greg was so weak he could barely speak. Richard held his hand as he died. Richard had fulfilled one of the promises Greg and he had made to each other – to be there when the other died. The other promise – a Houdini-like pact to make contact from the "other side" – was the one Greg had more of a hand in. A few months later, on Halloween night, Greg appeared in a dream that seemed "more than a dream." Richard came away from that almost convinced that it "really happened" i.e. was more than a dream. The next time convinced was the clincher.

It was Easter morning, 1980. Richard was wandering in darkness when he came upon Greg’s mother dressed in futuristic samurai attire guarding a doorway. She allowed Richard to pass, and he went upstairs to a castle turret room where Greg sat on the edge of a bed smiling. As Richard stood astonished, he said he was doing fine – a kind of recuperation. Greg asked Richard to tell his wife he was okay. Richard looked around the well-lit ancient arched windowed room. Who made all these great paintings on the wall? Richard wondered. Richard wanted to ask Greg many questions, but he smiled, handed him a mirror, and as Richard looked at it, he told him not to think so much about himself.

After that Richard started drawing for the first time in his life. Richard made pictures of rivers and musicians and windows and Greg and other-worldly creatures. Richard went to Haiti again and again, and got divorced. Richard happily remarried and quit drawing until 1996.

Richard was assigned to Home and Hospital Teaching and has been a tele-teacher since 1991, teaching children with poor health or ill behavior over the telephone. While sitting at his desk, Richard started drawing again on his desk blotter with anything he could find in the drawer – glue, markers, white-out, pens, and pencils. Soon all the blotters in the office were filled with his spontaneous drawings of Shiva, Steven Hawking, Schroedinger’s cat, Satan gambling on the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter. While most of his colleagues were either uninterested or slightly bemused, his good friend Michael Spurrier took his blotter drawings and a few of the paintings Richard had started to make on scrap wood down to the American Visionary Art Museum in the spring of 1997. Julliana Trotta, the buyer at the time, liked the work. Since that time Richard has been selling paintings there.

Richard says that his paintings – both the technique and subject matter – reflect his experiences, which ask, "What is the difference between ‘dream’ and ‘reality’?" and, "How is the shape of the universe the same as the form of the human mind?"

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