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| Biography |
Terrell S. Lester was born in Lincoln Nebraska in 1948. While in elementary school, his interest in art led him to enter a drawing contest. One of the awards was a scholarship for an art course at the University of Nebraska. Terrell won that award and during that course he realized that a career in art was something he might like to pursue. When he was a teenager his family moved to Orlando, Florida. The pristine lakes, springs and beaches close by were "the best part of his youth" and he spend most of his time exploring what was, at that time, almost a wilderness not far from the city limits. His art interests were put aside for a while and replaced with music and sports.
After High School, Junior College and several attempts to find a job that was creative and challenging, he began a career in Engineering and Surveying which enabled him to be out in the environment. He became Head of Technical Support for a large environmentally innovative engineering firm. This was creative and challenging but also showed him how the environment that he loved so much was becoming destroyed. It became clear that one way he could preserve the beauty around him was on film, so in the early 1980s he pursued photography. He studied and read everything he could find in order to learn a way of expressing himself in a medium that was entirely new to him. He set up a darkroom in his bathroom and started exhibiting his photographs.
In 1985 Terrell moved to Rochester, New York to start a full time career as a fine art landscape photographer. For ten years he traveled the east coast following the seasons photographing and exhibiting at almost 40 outdoor art shows a year. In 1987, on one of his trips to Maine, he discovered Deer Isle. It did not take long for him to decide that this was where he wanted to make his home.
In May 1988, his garage was transformed into the original Terrell Lester Gallery and Terrell's work became a well received addition to the art community on the island. In 1993 the gallery was moved into the old post office building in Deer Isle village. It was such a successful move that the art show schedule for that summer had to be cancelled in order to fill print orders generated by the gallery. The gallery has expanded every year and print sales of Lester's photographic images have continued to grow year after year.
Currently, Terrell's work is represented by many fine art galleries throughout the United States and in major museum, corporate and private collections.
His first book, "MAINE: The Seasons" was published by Knopf/Random House in 2001. It contains 125 images of his Maine photographs with essays by Pulitzer Prize winning authors Richard Ford and Richard Russo as well as Anne Beattie and Elizabeth Strout.
Terrell makes all of his own fine art archival prints to last for centuries and to ensure the final print is his own unique artistic creation. |
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