A conversation with artist Dick Termes, creator of the Termesphere, quickly becomes part geometry lesson, part art lesson. There’s talk of six-point perspectives, dodecahedron three-dimensional puzzles and total visual space. He admits that one student at a Termesphere workshop suffered a “Termesphere headache” trying to understand the dimensional challenges of the spheres. Most people, however, don’t study the geometry of …
December 2008 Newsletter
Up Down and All Around For the last four months I have been working on a traveling display of my concepts for the H.O.P. (Hands-On Partnership) for Science, Literature and Art in South Dakota and the Discovery Center in Pierre. The display goes into a trailer which is checked out by libraries and schools around South Dakota. They set the …
A Round Town – Termesphere in 4 minutes.
I am most pleased with this video where we took six months of work an condensed it into four minutes. Sometimes life seems like it is that short. I am pleased with this art piece in that it allowed my six point perspective to really show up. The structure running through the whole piece also holds the images together. My …
Lakota Headmen
Lakota Headmen – Sitting Bull, Black Elk, American Horse, Red Cloud, Big Foot, Little Wound, Red Shirt, Gall, Short Bull, Spotted Tail and Crazy Horse’s Shield (as there are no pictures) call all be found in this teepee. This piece was enlarged to eight foot tall for the Little Wound High School in Kyle South Dakota with the help of …
Patterns of Reflection
Patterns of Reflection is a 24″ diameter Termesphere. It is a study of reflections in a pond. You as the viewer are in the middle of the pond turning in a circle looking at the trees around you and their reflections into the water. Working with the sphere and imagining he was within a transparent sphere in the pond I …
Reflecting Back
Reflecting Back is a 17″ diameter sphere that was painted in 1989. Deadwood South Dakota is very close to where I live. Much of this painting was done on location in the Adams House. This house is now owned by the city of Deadwood. This is one of my best examples of the six point perspective system. The ghost image …
Explaining Some of my Older Ideas
CAPTURED WORLD POLYHEDRA When I created these polyhedron paintings, my interest was in getting the concept of the six-point perspective into a reproducible form. At that time I wasn’t able to reproduce the spherical paintings as spheres so the best next thing was to flatten the spheres into polyhedron so they could be reproduced. I wanted a similar concept to …
New Sphere…
What I am working on at this point is a transparent 36″ diameter sphere. I started with a scene of cubical patterns projecting in six point perspective with a great deal of transparent areas between them. A variety of different size circles where drawn over this. I kept what was inside the circles transparent and painted everything on the outside …
Where Do Ideas Come From?
I believe most of my ideas come from art pieces I have done in the past. Ideas grow from ideas. Ideas also come from other artist’s work and from studying geometry of the sphere and also from theories in Science that I read. Many building interiors also have inspired my art. I have done a whole series of Famous Interiors …
Why does the Termes Illusion work?
Why does the Termesphere seem to flip and read like it was a concave surface and the motion reverse? My opinion is this: all illusions work because the mind is used to one thing and the designer or artist pushes the image away from that normality. The illusion happens when the mind pushes it back to what it thinks is …