If you guys are out in the South Dakota area near Sturgis, a little town called
Spearfish, you want something different come and check out this art gallery. It's
out of this world--definitely come check this place out--we'll put the links below.
we're here in Spearfish South Dakota what you doing here Dick we have a little gallery
out here called the Thermosphere Gallery named after myself Termes-spheres what my main concept
is is that i imagine i'm in the sphere and i'm looking north south east west up and down
inside the sphere but i actually do it all on the outside like an explanation of being
inside the sphere half of the scene of the room is on the inside of the sphere and then the other
half of the same room is on the outside you get into it i was trying to figure out how to take
one and two point perspective and continue with that system take three four five and i ended up
with six point perspective so i did this as a drawing and as a subject matter and when i was
going to school somebody just suggested in one of my drawings it was like a fish-eye lens yeah
they said man that really looks like a ball wasn't i thought oh i wonder if this
would fit on the ball this is the first one but it's a complete room the floor is here
yeah yeah here and north and you made that on an old ball right it's the kids ball yeah about to
say it looks like a soccer ball yeah it was just 1968 1969 but i was still an oil painter at that
time and i had to wait forever for the paint to dry how many years have you been creating these
52 years oh wow so you didn't just start doing that this is not just yesterday's stuff
you the only one that makes is this called sphere art Dick Termes is the only person in the world
who paints in six point perspective on a sphere people played off of it for years you know i kind
of know where they saw my work most of them that do it it's not the only person who ever never has
he'll tell you how to do it there was one guy in Paris that actually did
a six point perspective sphere big one the same year i did my first one he did
one and then he quit he went back to printmaking later i talked to him about it and he said well
i'm a printmaker and i didn't know what to do with the idea he took a lot of the perspective concepts
back to his flat surface and did some really nice like fisheye what do you make the spheres out of
the stairs i buy is a polyethylene plastic light fixture actually hanging with a light bulb inside
how long does it take you to do something like this that one probably four months just to put
the lines of the geometry on there yeah yeah a month and a half now to get all of that detail in
can you like sum up for us like the layman person how you use the mathematics with the creation the
geometry that's found in these things a lot of it comes out of the platonic solid
and the simplest one is this one that has there are six vertices to it and that's a good example
of what when i start off on the sphere i just find six equal distance points on the sphere which is
the vertices of an octahedron and i apply those and then all of my lines project to those points
it turns into allowing me to do realism or makeup world a lot of these other shapes like the cube
and then the sixthness is the center of the base later i got just into the pure geometry like this
piece right here if you look really close at that there's a complicated little substructure going on
behind the waves and it's like pentagons within pentagons that end up making those spirals the
depth of it is pretty intriguing it's fun for me to start with a real geometry system and
then see where it takes me with realism so do you do it from memory or from images actually i have
a patent on it this is what i've helped me with some of the realism sometimes when i can actually
be in the building i'll just actually do the whole painting like in Paris a lot of times i'll take
this what's called the total photograph what i do is i build a mount that looks just like this 12
pentagons and i mount it to the tripod and then i go into particular building usually that i like i
move my camera though from face to face and take a separate picture when i get those back where that
image is i just cut it there and then i know a template is going to be that size and they're
all exactly the same and no one had ever done it before now the computers play with this a lot some
of them are more into the geometry like this guy up here then a lot of them are made up worlds with
the gargoyles all sitting inside this one is an imaginary world too but a repeated pattern gets
into the math side because it's always fun to help people with three-dimensional geometries
without them knowing they're learning something new a little kid taught me how to do that with
his smartphone he was standing in front of my spheres i said are you doing a video and he says
no no i'm doing a panoramic yeah he says you want to see what it looks like and they showed me one
of these we've got a ton of guys now those are cool too yeah they really turned out quite fun
so do you have a favorite i suppose this is one of my favorites just because it shows what it can do
in the real world and that's in northern Paris a lot of different directions i like to go and if i
pick my favorite i need one of all of them yeah you can have a favorite in every category
what's the main thing you want to let people know about your art to make people more aware of the
sphere and the globe the universe and the earth we live on because it's all spherical too and
many of the same design problems happen on the earth that happen when i work on my spheres i
know that when i change something on this side it actually changes something on the other side right
and that's one lesson we really haven't learned very much of on the earth that
you've affect something over here and it's going to affect the other side also.
We really appreciate you showing us around your gallery today. I'm glad you came to check it out.