The feature comes from Samantha Brown’s Places to Love, a PBS travel series that airs nationally. Brown spent years on the Travel Channel before bringing the show to PBS, where it has continued to run across the country and build a steady audience.
This episode, Art & Artisans, follows eight artists in different parts of the U.S. Dick Termes is one of them.
Out past Spearfish, the setup hasn’t changed much. The Termesphere Gallery sits a little off the side of a dirt road. Then you step inside the geodesic dome, the room opens up, and entire worlds, dozens of them, spin all around you.
Each one is built from the same idea. Instead of painting a single view, Termes paints the entire environment, every direction at once. Up, down, behind you, all wrapped onto a sphere.
He’s been working on this idea for decades. As a painter, one viewpoint wasn’t enough. So he pushed past it, developing six-point perspective so he could paint everything on one spherical canvas, not just what he could see in front of him.
You don’t really look at one of these and move on. You stay with them, watch them closely as they turn. You wait for that little detail you just noticed to come back around again. The longer you stand there, the more you realize Termes is showing you an entire world.
That’s what Brown leans into in the segment. Not just how the spheres look, but what they ask of you as you’re standing there with them.
When she asks Termes what he hopes people take away from art, his answer surprised her with its simplicity: “Be aware of the total visual space in front of you, turn around, take it all in…”
Samantha’s show itself is built around stopping and celebrating those obscure little places when we travel. Not obvious landmarks, but quieter places where someone has been working on something long enough that it becomes its own destination. In this episode, that includes studios across the country.
In this case, that place sits just outside Spearfish, right here in our own Black Hills. A geodesic dome tucked off a dirt road, filled with work that doesn’t really fit anywhere else. The gallery doesn’t need a show to explain what it is. Anyone who’s made the trip out there already knows. This just puts it in front of a few more people who might not have found it otherwise.
Watch the full eposode of Samantha Brown’s Places to Love: Art & Artisans
Samantha Brown’s Places to Love
airs on PBS stations nationwide and is available for streaming through PBS platforms.
Dick Termes and the Termesphere Gallery are located at 1920 Christensen Drive in Spearfish, SD. Learn more about his work at termespheres.com