Rushworth, Terry
Associate Member
Biography
Born in 1950, Terry started drawing very early mainly to combat the bordom of extended periods of hospitalization. Drawing helped him to escape the dreary monotony of hospital life into an imaginary world.
Terry studied Art and Design at Oldham Art School (1967-1969). After leaving Art School he continued to paint joining forces with 3 other likeminded artists to form the Embryo Group. This enabled them to share the cost of staging exhibitions of their work all over the country. Terry was approached by the Portland Gallery Manchester which from 1973 represented him and his work. This gallery along with the Colin Jellicoe Gallery staged the North West One exhibition at the Chenil Gallery London alongside artists shuch as Geoffrey Key, John McCoombs, Ted Roocroft and David Hockney.
Feeling slightly out of his depth in such company he concluded that he needed a more formal art education. So he enrolled on a Fine Art Degree course at what is now known as Manchester Metropolitan University. This was a profoundly damaging time for him artistically. His work was constantly derided by many of his tutors as it did not conform to currently fashionable beliefs of what art should be. He was told that his dedication to the craft of painting and drawing was merely painting by numbers.
Luckily Howard Hodgkin was the external assessor and he liked Terry’s work and through his influence Terry gained a 2:1. But the damage the previous three years had done made him doubt his art. Although he did still paint in fits and starts, he concentrated on living a ‘normal life’. Using his abilities as an illustrator in a series of jobs until in the late 90’s he started designing, animating and developing special needs educational software for Granada Television. However the steady realisation that art was a passion that had not died within him grew until in late 2015 he began to paint full time again. He had his first solo show at Gallery Oldham in the summer of 2018.
Terry’s work derives from his fascination with the idea of the English eerie. The idea of uncanny forces, which resonate in a place, the buried mysteries and secrets that lie just under the surface of a landscape, ‘the skull beneath the skin of the countryside’ and explore children’s imagination and perception of the uncanniness of everyday objects and places. He seeks to show that things are never quite what they seem and that the viewer will build their own narratives in order to unravel the mystery.
He works exclusively with oil on canvas and pencil on paper.
Terry’s Website: