Terry Bell (1946 - 2017)

Bolinas artist Terry Bell constantly produced beautifully crafted, labor intensive, witty artwork, but rarely showed it to anyone except close friends. This image, created with a few lines and thousands of dots, is visual play on words. At one time a 25 cent coin was commonly referred to as a “slug.”

Terry Bell lived in a small off-the-grid cabin beside the creek in Paradise Valley for forty years. He worked at the local hardware store where he shared his extensive knowledge of the store’s business and also his dry humor and erudite conversation about literature and film. Bell was trained as an artist in the 1960s at Drake University in Iowa. He settled in Bolinas in the early 1970s and worked closely with renowned ethno–botanist Dennis Breedlove to create botanical line drawings of exquisite quality. Bell also created illustrations for the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.