by David Eisenhauer
Almost everything in Dick Termes’ world is round – the sun breaking through morning haze, the tennis ball he batted back and forth before breakfast, the four geodesic domes in which he lives and works.
For more than 30 years, Termes has eschewed traditional flat canvases to create his art on polycarbonate globes he calls “Termespheres.” He came up with the idea while completing his master’s degree at UW in the late 1960s, and it has been his passion ever since. Termes estimates he has painted more than 200 major spheres so far – about a third of those by commission – and his work is displayed internationally, from North Pole High School in Alaska to the Tokyo Museum in Japan.
“In art, the most important thing to find is an original thing to do,” he says. “There have been lots of paintings done over thousands of years, most on flat surfaces. The sphere adds a whole new set of geometries that fits with the real world better than a flat surface. Three-dimensional space is what we live in.”