Artist Q&A with Terry Rodgers

Terry Rodgers is an internationally recognized artist who has worked and lived in Washington, DC, Massachusetts, and Ohio. Rodgers’ current work focuses on portraying contemporary body politics. His rendering of an imaginary leisure life stands as an iconic vision of the tensions and confusions endemic to today’s society. These images are not snapshots or slices of life, but rather a compression and dissection of our rampant imaginations and mediated influences. The seductive and marvelous glamour of the outer world jars against the vulnerability and delicacy of our inner and private selves.

Who is your favorite artist of all time?

I have many artists that I admire for many different reasons. So, for me, it is impossible to choose one. Let me list a few in no particular order: Piero della Francesca, Max Beckmann, Joel Peter Witkin, John Singer Sargent, Toulouse-Lautrec, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Anders Zorn, Diego Velazquez, Agnolo Bronzino, Edgar Degas, Cy Twombly, Auguste Rodin Edouard Manet, Peter Paul Rubens, and Alice Neel.

How did you become a professional artist?

Interest and obsession have a lot to do with it, and looking and noticing carried me away.

What are the influences and inspirations in your work?

Perhaps more important is, what do I think about when I’m developing the Magwerks and the archival prints?

What are the effects of our super-photographic world, the miraculous, if not realistic, screen and magazine colors, the high impact graphic design of everything, the perfect plating requirements of the would-be food aficionados? What is it about the “best of, highest-rated, 5-star” that so commands our attention? Someone’s attention.  

And then what is it about the sloosh of a sloppy smear of … Click here to read more