About the Featured Cover Artist
Terry Barrett
UNTITLED (but honoring Matisse) is one of many small acrylic paintings on heavy paper. Each painting starts with the modernist grid as a structure. Each work utilizes a grid that is visibly present to varying degrees. The grid serves as a metaphor for actual or desired structure in life, for "givens", from a postmodernist view. The paintings play with the grid: Sometimes they resist it, sometimes they subvert it, and sometimes they are overwhelmed by it. The grid can represent language, culture, religion, and so forth. The elements within the grid can be seen as an individual’s or community’s response to imposed or accepted grids of life.
I view myself as an artist (one of my grids) but I am happy to make a living as an art educator (a different grid), and devote most of my expressive energy to writing and teaching. However, I have refined an art process to fit my life-style. Because the paintings are small, I do not need a large studio space. Storage is not a problem. Acrylic and paper are friendly media and allow me to work at a comfortable pace. Water-based materials are easy to clean up. I work on the paintings for short amounts of time and do not need extensive periods of the day or the year to complete pieces. I scan the finished paintings to make available computer prints of varying sizes. I have chosen to paint for personal pleasure, and I have not entered the fray of the art market.
Terry Barrett is a Professor of Art Education at Ohio State University. He began his career teaching art at a large inner-city high school in St. Louis, Missouri. At the University, Dr. Barrett teaches courses in criticism and aesthetics. He is a recipient of teaching awards. Since 1986 he has worked in schools and communities as an Art Critic-in-Education for the Ohio Arts Council, engaging students, museum docents, and citizen groups in discussions about art. He serves as a consultant to museums and educational organizations, has been a visiting scholar to educational service organizations and universities, and juries exhibitions.
Dr. Barrett’s research interests include problems of teaching and learning art, photography, art criticism, photography criticism, and aesthetics in schools and museums. He is author of the books Why Is That Art?: Aesthetics and Criticism of Contemporary Art (Oxford University Press, 2007); Interpreting Art: Reflecting, Wondering and Responding (McGraw-Hill, 2003); Criticizing Photographs: An Introduction to Understanding Images (McGraw-Hill, 4th edition, 2006); Criticizing Art: Understanding the Contemporary (McGraw-Hill, 2nd edition, 2000); and Talking About Student Art (Davis 1997). He is editor of Lessons for Teaching Art Criticism (ERIC Art, 1995). He is currently completing a studio text for college foundations courses, Making Art: Form & Meaning (McGraw-Hill 2008).
