Terrance Hughes As… A Pusher of Art.

“I just gravitated towards art, I would study my mother’s album cover collections and draw those, i just like the expressions of it, how to translate a mood or emotion into something physical.”

Terrance Hughes is an artist and a graphic designer for a prominent label and lives in New York City. He started painting by watching the “Joy of Painting” and mimicking Bob Ross as a child. He paints and draws on canvas, photography or paper. He classifies his art genre as figurative work. He was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. Growing up, his peers placed a stigma on him. Though Terrance Hughes is African American and lived in a predominantly black neighborhood, his black peers labeled him as “not being black enough”.

As a teenager, Terrance grew up skateboarding. Skateboarding can be a recreational sport, but there also exist a subculture and because of it, his peers failed to grasp his sense of fashion or even some of the music he listened to. Let’s face it; Fagazi, The Cure or Sonic Youth isn’t exactly Black music but is it non-black music? As a result, his teenage experiences, his earlier art work displayed a heavy dose of his philosophy on self-identity that goes beyond race. Terrance started to paint seriously when he was fourteen years-old for the ‘joy of it’ but more importantly, as an odyssey to self-discovery.

His latest series, ‘BLACK HOLLYWOOD‘ is based on past and present stereotypical images of black people in film and television. In this series, he describes his subjects as “coon characters” with a reverse black-face on which lends a comical yet haunting lure to his work.  Terrance says [on black-face], “the emphasis was always sort of on the lips and the eyes, that’s the only features you pick up; the mouth and the eyes; no ears, no nose, it’s sort of a very generic, very simplistic view of a person.” The portraits represent the characters played by actors being introduced at the start of the film as… “black”.

His current works are less about race and more about dissonance in society, politics, and the ‘chains’ of living that everyone can relate to. And, the pieces aren’t fluffy or sanguine but poignant, intelligent and above all else, discerningly cognizant.  For Terrance, art was about exercising demons from his early teen years by not being black enough.

“I’m more than just a black person and an artist.  I don’t get too autobiographical about my work, I’ve done it in the past, I want to talk about other things in my work and not have it be about me.”

He continues, “My work is not about black and white but more about stigmas that are being placed and in turn [us] trying to live up to those expectations but even now, I’m trying to get more into the interactions of people, I want to branch out and become more minimum and less complicated.”

Terrance is currently working on a new series of figurative art by digitally rendering and overlapping photographs then manipulating it with sketch. Also, he’s hand-drawing sketches on T-shirts which will soon be posted with his other works, such as The Tom & Deebo Show!!! on his website: http://terrancehughes.com.

If Terrance is pushing paint or creativity or his conception through his drawings, he undoubtedly pushes me to take the journey with him by asking myself, “Who am I as… ‘as…’.

by corine michel