Experiment in Art: A Conversation with Terry Thacker 


Published February 3rd 2025
By Laurie Campbell Pannell


Terry Thacker in his studio, in front of his series, Woman with the Alabaster Jar, shown recently in a group exhibition at Zeitgeist.

I have been eager to interview artist and educator Terry Thacker, even though we had spoken together almost daily during time in the MFA program at Watkins/Belmont University. Under his mentorship, I had the unique privilege to get inside the mind and creative domain of this rigorous and inventive artist. With a highly critical mind, Terry considers the often unconsidered aspects and interrelationships of literature, language, art, religion, and history, and challenges their very constructs. His innovative work is based on allegory, metaphor, theater, chance, and disruption, with all the indeterminacy of John Cage’s music. Terry’s artwork begins with graphic games that are overtaken by narrative figurations that are charged with an element of chaos and unpredictability, becoming abstracted and less recognizable with each painted and collaged layer. With his eccentric music playlist as the backdrop to our in-studio conversation, his abstracted thinking played out decision by decision as he talked me through his work most recently exhibited in a group exhibition at Zeitgeist in Nashville.





Laurie: It’s great to catch up with you after seeing a couple of pieces of your new series at the group show at Zeitgeist. I loved learning from you, especially how you think about abstraction. You explained that it is simply ‘a moving away from.’ So your works have a starting point that is somewhat literal, with a few recognizable forms, but then are abstracted to the point of nonrepresentation. What I’d like to talk about today is how you came to think so abstractly and how you make these choices in your work. 

Terry: That’s what the word ‘abstract’ means, to draw away from, to move away from. I started off as a figurative painter and tried to move to more and more believable forms. Not realistic images, but where someone would accept the image that I painted as honest. I got to the point where I could make photorealistic and trompe-l'œil paintings, but both genres were disappointing in that they didn’t deliver a convincing interpretation of the world. They were well crafted and sellable, but frustratingly limited—boring. At that time (a long time ago), De Niro’s character in “Taxi Driver,” Gabriel García Márquez’ block of ice, or David Byrne’s “Psycho Killer” seemed more REAL. There was something seductive, contrary, tangible, and alive. The same with Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon—moving away from pure observation to some other, more vital, hybrid form. Abstraction is a drawing away from one established, named thing to arrive at a set of, hopefully useful, other things and conditions. Take this studio, for example—three tables, two working walls—a chaos of gathered things—several sequences of graphic games, two dozen digital prints cut, folded and crumpled, 20 very quick ink or paint blob experiments, each singular thing waiting for neighbors, partners, co-conspirators, or antagonists. They desire play—to move or dance outside their singularity, like the music of Charles Ives and John Cage, without losing their intense, rigorous relationship to their particular histories. Figuration and abstraction aren’t polemical. All figuration is abstract; all abstraction, figurative. I hope to frame and edit these things as if they were parts of a theatrical production.





Laurie: I love this sort of thinking, the way your experimental mind challenges abstraction itself. When did you think you might become an artist? What sort of early childhood experiences heightened your chances of becoming an artist? 

Terry: Well, regarding abstraction, I’m really trying to move the work away from subjectivity, nostalgia. To resist codification, which is another way of saying resist clichés, resist objectification, resist perfection. They leave a culture shallow—they rob life. Here are a couple of lines from Sylvia Plath: 

“Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children. 
Cold as snow breath. It tamps the womb.” 
           (Sylvia Plath, “The Munich Mannequins,” 1965)


But, to the other part of the question, I grew up in a typical 60’s neighborhood, playing in the creek, spending hours in the woods that framed an overgrown, pre-Civil War graveyard, inventing games, and building skateboards and treehouses. Childhood was contemplative, always drawing or building something. I built this studio. And that interest started at 8 or 9—I thought I could build most anything.

There was no talk of art and very little art to see, although I was always drawing and making. At some point, I found a few $2 art books on sale, not knowing who the artists were—Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Soutine. 

I remember being blown away by my first trip to a museum. Young and hypnotized by Manet—confused and angry at Dubuffet, who later became very impactful. An aside, I met his assistant who ran a small, mostly Dubuffet bookstore in Venice—gracious, animated and informative. I left with two exhibition catalogs—one gift and one purchase.

So there’s a slow but significant shift in thinking about what art should do, what’s at stake and what the possibilities were. Curated shows and serious criticism gave me a front-row seat to histories’ more vital conversations.

Laurie: Would you elaborate on your sense of history? How did that affect your work?

Terry: Most abstract positions and painting itself felt exhausted. Abstraction was unable to deliver on reduced, universal/universalizing form; cultural and self-expression seemed simulated, bombastic, Trumpian; and attempts at myth/spirit/religion was illustrative, fundamentalist, diluted. I felt like I was looking over the ruins of abstraction’s sacred texts. (I’m borrowing heavily from Walter Benjamin, Ives, Beckett, Sylvia Plath, Johns, and Richter, etc.) These folks understood these modernist, sacred texts as necessary, but far from sacred. Language became a Babel-like scattering of language that could be reassembled in hysterical and beautiful ways.



T. Thacker, oil and encaustic on linen with linen frame, (a prior work), 96”x 66”

Laurie: Your art seems rooted in allegory, or is it your poetic way of looking? Who did you study with or where? What came next in your artistic development?

Terry: I was very naïve. I went to inner-city schools in Nashville, and there was no advice. I was a mason’s laborer at 15 and thought that would be my profession. But a counselor said I should go to college. My best friend went to Austin Peay State University, so that’s where I went without any research. Max Hochstetler taught there; he painted 10 murals covering the Opryland Hotel’s lobby as it was being built, and I was an assistant to that work. Then I went to grad school at UT and got my MFA. After that, I was teaching at Freed-Hardeman University, and then applied for some residencies. I studied with Alice Aycock at the Atlantic Center for the Arts; she designed the red steel Ghost Ballet sculpture down on the Cumberland River Bank. And I attended another residency on Long Island to expand the limitations of my education. 

I taught at Freed-Hardeman for 14 years, and I taught at Lipscomb University. Then I taught at MTSU a few years, and later took a full-time job at Savannah College of Art and Design. Then Watkins College called for me to chair the program. My family was still in Nashville and I was really excited about it. It was the only place in the region that was trying to make art that was aligned with my interests, thinking of art as a conceptual, discursive practice. I was there a dozen years. I had approached TSU and Vandy for a collective MFA but as I was planning to retire, Kristi Hargrove developed the master’s program. Many were helpful on the front-end, mostly Kristi, and Jodi Hays, getting the word out. They kept me on to help with the Belmont University MFA program as professor emeritus. 



Terry Thacker pictured in his studio.

Laurie: What has been significant in your artistic process across the years? 

Terry: I think those shifts that were mentioned earlier could be restated as me seeing art’s role as discursive and rooted in language (form + content). Art emerges from form, craft, and process as it attempts to fold those grammatical concerns in with conceptual, historical, and critical concerns. Form/process could never be reduced and isolated from other contextual concerns, so criticism, literature, music, film (all cultural objects) became increasingly necessary for my practice. Additionally, learning to play with new processes, and most importantly, conversations with colleagues, have been a great motivating pleasure.

Laurie: What are the primary mediums you’re working with today? 

Terry: Just about anything goes, but mostly oil and enamel paint, resin for hyper-shiny transparency, collage, and then I’ll manipulate the paper, like with folding or corrugating. Layers of paper on the tables merge with oil painting or even sculptural objects. There was a time when I was disillusioned with painting. The premature “death of painting” had been announced (for the third time), so it was time to look for other processes. I was doing sculpture and video work for a while. I had a sculpture and video show at Memphis Center for Contemporary Art. But I was still painting and teaching painting. I never quit painting. 


T. Thacker, Cloud: Some of Her Names, 30”x 96”

Laurie: What about scale? 

Terry: For a long time, my studio was a mason’s tool bag— pencils, Bic pens, India ink, gouache, tape, and paper. All the pieces were small, incomplete, fragmentary. At the same time, I was interested in the scale of allegory and theater. The small works became metaphoric, metonymic, anthropomorphic, and begged for a stage. The pieces became mug shots, cinematic details, props, all occasionally staged, a cluster of “colliding and colluding” (Karsten Harries), metaphors—stand-ins for a kind of truth found in fiction.

Allegory is not a singular story. It requires a half dozen images to create an allegory. It is dependent on multiple settings, theatrical spaces, and story-telling. It is the very opposite of a symbol, which is one fixed thing. It is a “mobile army of metaphors” (Nietzsche). The interactions are more important than a singular thing. For example, there are seven in this most recent series of works, really nine, but they can be edited down to five or six. I can eliminate characters or add them to tell a story. An allegory is bigger than a symbol. Truth is a mobile army, a constantly moving and changing thing, rather than static. And it is figurative, there are many forms of figurations. 

Borges and Benjamin also became important writers for me. That phrase, “I’m unpacking my library” … Benjamin is moving and gets to his new place, and all his books are in boxes, “not yet touched by the mild boredom of order” (Benjamin). Like Benjamin, I can place the multiple sources and cultures into a new and different arrangement, rather than putting them all into tidy taxonomies. I can rearrange them to meet the needs of our present conditions.




Laurie: What about color, texture, and contrast? How do those play into your work?

Terry: The quality and variation of mark and color can be intuitive and expressive. They can be very subjective. I try to move those elements away from subjectivity. You could find yourself building a very small, solipsistic world. However, they can be used to build nuanced allegorical detail. They can contribute to the theatricality—what is expressed through vibrancy and restraint. Rather than starting with subjective color harmonies—colors I like—I begin with a structure of CMY (cyan, magenta, and yellow), like Mondrian or Johns using RYB (red, yellow, and blue)—light secondaries replacing pigment primaries. You have the possibility of light being a metaphor in the way you use color. Or, by adding black or grey, painting over CMYK and then sanding back into it and uncovering some, you can erase light metaphorically. So I use color structure more conceptually. But I often stray from initial ideas and structures. 

Laurie: Will you describe your artistic process to us? 

Terry: I really like John Cage’s music, and it’s somewhat like that. John Cage taught at Black Mountain College, and many artists were coming out of that school—Rauschenberg, the Albers, and others. One of the main takeaways was an aleatoric process. The word means to roll the dice, literally. The creative method means there is an element of chaos or noncontrol. I tend to try to roll the dice in my work, which is impossible in a way. As soon as you make choices, those are limitations you’ve set up. So it is very much like a game, like a Duchampian thing, his love of chess, or like Cage’s idea of the aleatoric, and Johns’ too. Metaphors are generally clichés, but you can take the cliché and do something to it to lift it out of its pedestrian cage. So I start with some sort of aleatoric process and reintroduce it throughout. The moves that are made are influenced by chance and/or story. 



Laurie: How do you take a chance element and move it toward allegory? 

Terry: You manipulate it to where it becomes purposeful and metonymic. A fragment of a thing comes to represent a whole thing. So all these artworks start with something random or chaotic.

Other artists look forward to going to the studio. I often times am not looking forward to it. It is often a scary space, and I’d rather watch TV or read a book! It’s a responsibility and I know there is going to be chaos, moving this chaotic thing toward something meaningful or truthful. There is pleasure in this process. Happy is the opposite of hapless.

Sometimes it is like, ‘What am I doing?’ If you’re a photorealistic or portrait painter, you’re working in the tradition to make it look like your model. You have a goal. It is knowable. But I don’t know, so I end up inventing games where a lot of chaotic stuff can happen. Like with this example, I have poured enamel on paper. I’ll just pour and then push it off, pouring black blobs and pouring white around the blobs, and squeegeeing off the paint, and that is the aleatoric process. You can’t really control it, but I can fold and tear and move and erase. Some are drawn on, and some are randomly painted dots with deliberate linear connections that can create a kind of Rorschach figuration. Later, it seems too totemic, so I’ll glue 18th century wig photos on it (Rococo theatricality)—pretty arbitrary. Then it sits around the studio eight or nine months, but it doesn’t get thrown away. 

This work began as ugly green dots stacked. On a road trip, these people were selling boiled peanuts. They had a big plywood sign, and the peanuts were drawn with a trashcan lid to make three stacked snowman-like circles. So I used that form, adding some partial elliptical arcs, to suggest cylinders—a flat and spatial game. The elliptical lids show up on this other drawing too. When you set them out, the works speak to each other and show you what elements to repeat, what is needed. I play with transparent cellophane on top of something that is its opposite—a gritty, raw, physical mark. Or I reintroduce yellow. These are conceptual drawings on 4 x 6 index cards and might become a maquette for a larger work. 




Laurie: What is the subject matter or content of this kind of abstract work, or is it even relevant?

Terry: What is the root of what I am doing? I grew up in a fundamentalist church. I was fully invested in it until I was an adult. What was essential and defined you, or you think is the case, you begin to challenge. At the same time, it sustains you. If that thinking gradually becomes not true … talk about truthfulness … you try to get at truthiness. I don’t really believe these stories anymore, but I think those stories have become re-formed to become something else—a pro-testant reformation. I would decide, “I am going to get out of this fiction,” and it is up to you to figure out what part is true and what part is not true. I think about possibilities and truthiness. The idea is to generate a way of thinking about the world that is allegorical, that challenges or questions fundamentalism of any type. It’s an abstraction, an idea, that can exist as fictive meta-conditions. 

These become characters, like these seven characters in the series, based on the woman with the alabaster jar. That was a lingering biblical story that I had to wrestle with. She was speaking ‘the other.’ If she is allowed to be part of the story, it is key to the story being told. It is describing something that is necessary—an unhinged rawness and sensuality. She is a maker of perfume, used to embalm, which is a life/death symbol. It is oily and fragrant and historically feminine. She is not to be excluded but embraced as a necessary condition. She has these wet, oily, out of control qualities; she has no name. Here, are seven names for her, and there could be 100 others. I am trying to create that relational element. A metaphor is a predicative thing; it has to be placed in some kind of action for it to remain meaningful. These shapes are contracting and expanding, like a heart or lung. I can add charcoal, so it becomes a shadowy form. And then if it is too transparent, if I don’t like it, I’ll just take it off.

Laurie: How has being an abstract artist affected your life?  

Terry: An abstract artist? I don’t feel connected to that label. I am more like a hybridized artist. But I don’t even like that. I do work in multiple medias. But it is the idea of a precondition that is constantly being interrupted or erased or altered or shifted, moving back and forth between multiple modes of representation and media. I do abstract, but the thing is as Nietzsche says, I am creating these fictive worlds. Like money is all fiction, just drawings on paper, only based on a shifting collective agreement. If you take that quote, you’re always suspicious of a category at the level of meaning. You try to reconfigure your thinking as you go. At the level of language, we have to change at that very core. This way of thinking refuses systems and labels and categories; it refuses the structure of the language. 




Laurie: What most impacts your ideation and this way of thinking? Holidays, travel, reading? 

Terry: Music. I know very little about it, but I listen to nearly everything. It’s kind of confusing, but I hear something in that music that seems odd or dissonant. I like it in the studio. I could never do that, so it is motivational. And the residue of what I read impacts my art. I tend to read too much theory, or I try to, and I have no background in it, so I am self-teaching. Art often skips over theory and is largely about making a thing look cool. I try to counter that with poetry and fiction. Travel also impacts my thinking, but I am also married with three kids, so that takes time, as do residencies. But I like to take trips or go see shows; you look forward to it and it really does motivate and stimulate the work. 

Laurie: Who has inspired you? Or who would you say your approach may be likened to? 

Terry: If we’re talking core influences, family, community, and colleges are most impactful. Giotto, Gruenwald, Velázquez, Manet, Cézanne … and the western modern artists like Jasper Johns. Your art will speak to you in a sense, and tell you it is being cheated or you’re adding too much. In my work, I’m hoping to arrive at a kind of truthfulness. Johns says, “One hopes for something resembling truth,” and Johns was the epitome of skepticism and ambivalence, but there is a kind of “truthful truthiness.” I am also inspired by many present-day artists—there are too many to name. 

Laurie: Does the art critics’ criticism matter? What about giving criticism to other artists? 

Terry: If the student can accept the fact that I’m coming from a point of view, then the criticism can be great. They don’t have to be thick-skinned. But sometimes they don’t understand your references, and you have to back up and give the context. It shouldn’t be adversarial. It is the opposite. Criticism is just an attempt at an objective description. Is this supposed to be good? In what sense? Are you aware that your proportions are off? It could be received as negative, but the proportions could be off for a reason relevant to a particular school of thought. From my point of view, criticism now has more to do with what group of writers and reviewers I gravitate towards. That is very necessary. One thing art is—it is a discursive practice. It desires conversation with community and history. For me to say that I paint independently of criticism is a lie. Either you’re oblivious to that, like a self-taught artist, or you are influenced by it. 

Laurie: As a multi-decade artist, I feel honored to have studied with you, and to interview you today. What’s next for Professor Terry Thacker?

Terry: I am very ambitious to be in here to wrestle with the ongoing thing. I’m in the studio every day. But at some point, art becomes an exercise one commits to. I have turned away from ambition towards fame or money or visibility. I’m happy to show my work and stay in community with artists. I’ve recently heard about Neue Welt Gallery. Mauro Barreto put together this rotating critique. The shows are impressive for the size of the space. That has been great, to connect with educated and knowledgeable artists and have these conversations. 



Terry Thacker has been an artist and educator for 30+ years with a master’s degree from UT Knoxville. His work has been shown in numerous regional and national exhibitions and galleries. He is professor emeritus at Belmont University. To learn more and speak to the artist directly, please email tthacker1776@gmail.com.

Laurie Campbell Pannell is a Nashville writer and artist with a master’s degree in fine art from Belmont University. She can be reached at LaurieCampbellPannell@gmail.com. To learn more, visit LaurieCampbellPannell.com. 

Keria Nashed is a second generation Coptic Egyptian artist and photographer based in Nashville, Tn. She is an MFA graduate student at Belmont University and can be reached at keriaydg@gmail.com.