HOOK

32 HOOK Painter Terry Straus' latest work is startlingly fresh and evocaKve. Though she has been painKng since middle school and her art has been in galleries for almost 30 years, her more recent work is something new. There is a vibrancy in the art that asks you quesKons about what you are seeing, what you are thinking, and how it makes you feel. You may be looking at a vase, but it is not like any other vase you have seen. The colors both clash and fit together, the background is alive with movement, and the final product feels three-dimen- sional even though it is simply oil paint on canvas or paper. "I started to play during the pandemic with this technique that I kept picking up and playing with and puLng down again," explains Straus. "I was kind of breaking the rules, working with crayons at first and then oil pastels and even oil sKcks and puLng washes of watercolor paint or acrylics and then taking things and scratching them off and going back to the beginning and puLng on more layers and scratching them off and looking at it again. Adding and reducing at the same Kme." Straus' career has morphed and evolved over Kme to fit her life, and she is quite comfortable with that fact. "Peo- ple always say you should pick one thing and just stay with one thing," she says. "I've looked at all my work and I've thought 'What does it all have in common?' because it is definitely not all one thing. I think the thing that links it is whatever I'm doing or caring about at that moment works itself into the art. When my kids were going to camp and school, I had a series with road signs and things on how lights look against the sky. When I was young, I had pic- tures of couples. I was taking a yoga class and I painted yoga postures. So whatever I'm doing sort of works into my art in some way." Straus was introduced to fine art in middle school and was instantly hooked. "Somebody gave me a paint set where you copy along and turn the pages and I realized how how engaged I was," she remembers. "It went from day, to night in a flash and at the end, it had started Artist Terry Straus Text by David Neilsen Photography by Andrea B. Swenson Tiny tributaries of blues flow- ing down the page around grey rocks made of Cray-Pas. Each one subtly different, each one emo&onal and hearelt. "I wanted it to look like you're gazing down into the river" 32 HOOK

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