S A N D Y O S T R A U
Terrel Dene Hale is the author of the sonnets featured in this catalog. We are deeply grateful for his contribution.
Terrel Dene Hale was born in Blackfoot, Idaho, and grew up in Yuba City in nor thern California. He ser ved a two-year full-time mission for his church in southeast Australia. He received his undergraduate degree in International Relations from Brigham Young University and completed a master’s in Librar y and information Science at San Jose State University. While working at The Hoover Institution’s African/Middle East Collection at Stanford University he published an ar ticle on French cultural colonialism in Senegal from the viewpoint of Car tesianism. He also published some of his sonnets in Peter Gizzi’s o.bl k and edited and published two volumes of his language poetr y journal, Screens and Tasted Parallels, upon the advice of his mentor, Diane Middlebrook in the English Depar tment.
Moving to the other side of the countr y, he worked at the African/Middle East Collection of the Law Librar y of Congress. While there he published the prose poem Saints and Latin Decadence and a legal bibliography, United States Sanctions and South Africa. He subsequently worked at a non-profit think tank, The Economic Policy Institute as Director of Librar y and Information Ser vices. Hale ran his first marathon at age 42, the Marine Corps Marathon. Training for his second Marine Corps Marathon he got his first massage and decided to go The Potomac Massage Training Institute to study and cer tify as a practicing massage therapist with a focus on runners. He went to the 2004 Olympics in Athens as a volunteer massage therapist. His interest in an integrative mind body medicine approach with runners led him to enter Saybrook University’s PhD program in Mind Body Medicine Practice.
In 2017, while in his PhD program, Hale became aware of a torn posterior tibialis tendon on his left ankle while per forming plyometrics at a track workout. Subsequent surger y and post-surger y rehabilitations led to a loss of his athletic identity. This, in turn led to his interest of researching the material for his disser tation and publishing this book. He received his doctorate in 2020 during COVID.
Hale and his wife, Agnes, live in Rockville, Mar yland. They have three children and four grandchildren. He swims, lift weights and runs, and meditates to experience the possibilities of mind, body, spirit integration with deep gratitude.
Cover: Swell Oil on canvas (framed) 36" x 36" $00,000 Inquire
S A N D Y O S T R A U
I take scenes of ever yday life — people, places and activities — and reduce them to their fundamental elements.
I strip away the super fluous detail and minutiae of the moment in order to present each scenario in its essence. At a cer tain point, specific content is not that impor tant or even relevant, but rather what appears to be going on, creating situations that can be obser ved or contemplated in more universal ways. This sense of ambiguity or vagueness allows for a range of interpretations and assumptions, for viewers to perhaps add their own content, emotions or undercurrents, overlaying what they think is happening with their own explanations. To heighten their engagement, I use texture to create a sense of dimensionality, a perception of three dimensions in two, thereby inviting viewers to "step into" each composition as if they were actually there, and to par ticipate in their own narratives.
Many of my paintings invoke feelings of solitude or even loneliness. The figures appear connected but often seem to be looking away from one another, absorbed in their own lives and stories, perhaps occasionally connecting, perhaps not, like strangers in the same scene. At other times, figures seem to be waiting for someone to arrive or for an activity to begin, anticipating a meeting or a reunion for instance. Whatever the circumstances, there's always an outcome awaiting discover y.
The ways I express feelings of solitude or disconnectedness in my open-ended plot lines are based on my own introspective moments as well as on assumptions about the subjects in my compositions. With my ever-present sketchbook, I obser ve alone, recording actions and interactions at a distance, working with whatever I can see, taking what little information is available and imagining the rest. So much is unclear, uncer tain and not possible to obser ve. Blending in the settings the trees, water, and other surroundings — I translate my obser vations into paintings, which in turn become the stories, stories we can either share with one another or ponder in our own unique and personal ways.
The Nor thern California Coast has always been an impor tant inspiration for my work. With plans to spend more time up there working, I’ve leased a beautiful studio space on The Sea Ranch. The surrounding coast geography will undoubtedly continue to influence my work.
~ Sandy Ostrau
Spring Lagoon
the paling, scaling water sounding was partial to a blue return of line sound rhyme bound to these intrepid echoed round corners the edges which cannot be cause but put forth nevertheless in how does the vernacular seem to take word bound hypothesis biofields of round meaning conscious as if it really buzz
while the screamers sang some blue fuzz of a pond like dream like sense of water in the flat touches of a just because, in the remembering of she draws with color with canvas underneath her shared sense of repurposing such whisper.
I got this one this morning and not sure I like it as much as some of the others. Sandy as opposed to north, the wind rattles white projecting the immensity of clean statuesque royalty, of standing lean like a kitchen in the middle of light where night disengages from a day’s slight improvement caught in forever’s sheen in between the dreamline and the soft mean meaning happens upon here with her quite sense of quiet approval she just might stand us all up as well as we become hers simply by looking and staying bright as the dull enough light proposes tight revenues and broad grays where all of some whispers back soliloquies that still numb.
South Beach
Oil on canvas (framed) 48" x 60" $0,000 Inquire
sky and stillness’ between
here the skying, sighing lovers conspire eternity’s long calming, staying tall, praying prayed increments of time in all glory, praise, and honor, a bluing lyre of two angels with their wordless choir of two beautifuls in standing such small impudent reasonings of psalming’s call of two wingless bits of heavening fire
what had their blueing to blue with desire, these two impoverished bits of lovely that even the gods will come admire these standing souls to perchance fly higher to reason’s rearing perspicuity, perhaps it’s really only you and me?
Terrel Hale
Between Stillness and Sky
Oil on canvas (framed) 48" x 48" $0,000 Inquire
overlooking crimson
for @sandy.ostrau
the color bloods the tangential evers of reverencing tethers of god wings and flying revelations hear our sings, our devotional psalmodies and wheres of abstraction where even our whispers and painted loud enoughs of dissemblings disassociated in the blinkings, that overlook justice and her murmurs
here, equivalent ambient god stirs are varied remembrances of cool illusion at its very best and purrs of illuminates evering occurs to purify and cleanse amends, to fool all offings justified, staying duel.
Crimson Overlook
Oil on panel (framed) 38" x 38" $0,000 Inquire
Grace she sings the merriments melancholy yellows as if graveside underneaths sun spoil into a beautiful her one glimpse she shares with us as one gracefully towards the cause of disturbs she saw such sea in with her dream lines making shapes begun before such time as the water air won such wonderfuls in graceful dives now done
a bunt of magical, a bit of fun a bouqueted orange-sense of how yellows bloom across time in the rhyming of some none of it in tremendous tries to open the night in how poise and good manners stun viewers with arabesque into the room, opened like treasures of a gold filled tomb.
Oil on canvas (framed) 36" x 36" $00,000
embrace me lingerings of horizon, we’ve been here before in the before long a cusp of blue indigos that belong each other’s agos like nursery rhymes on holding time, embracing coloring gone to the faraways that we stand around song the rightfulness of here that’s never wrong to sing fearlessly music of the dawn the offing of the light on horizon the meandering of stayed purposing the fearless excavation of the sun the wars that lost ourselves that we both won that both of our duets that almost bring us back to the very first of singing.
Concer t
Oil on panel (framed) 34" x 34" $00,000
Sea and Beach Path
The Fates
Oil on canvas (framed) 60" x 60" $00,000 illumination vulgare
a gust of trio opens opera like breaches in the white of scrambling, swiveling, corroding roofs, scattering the valuables that terza rima saw like ellipses, casement window crows caw along the ocean yard gargoyles placing six feet to steady ourselves in standing entering this painting, a private awe whose period lies on the seaside straw, whose hearse of sleep, lonely, rolling shepherd's geometry is turning silent law to a caught, unaffected dreamtime flaw at the top of the right hand sky like herds of what the angel saw and absent birds.
Terrel Hale
