Terri Hallman was born on August 10th, 1962, in a small town in Wisconsin, and is the youngest of four children. She attended Junior College in Hibbing, Minnesota, and also attended the Minneapolis College Of Art And Design from 1986-1991, where she graduated with a Bachelor's Degree in Design. She worked in the field of Design from 1987-1993, where she earned two awards for International Packaging Design. She is presently living in San Diego, California, close to her family and friends, and has been represented in many galleries.

Technique
The technique that Terri employs is dry pigment on paper, adding a clear acrylic spray, which sets the pigment in place. Multiple layers are built up and masked off in different areas with various sized tapes and hand pressed into the paper, no brushes are used. She then scrapes away some of the pigment to reveal previous layers and all tape is removed. This is a very quick process that she likens to handwriting…fast and expressive. At this point, if the piece is not flowing in the direction she hoped, she proceeds to a more labor intensive process where she begins to continuously build up the areas that are lacking, using acrylic mediums and employing the aforementioned masking-off and tearing away technique, until the piece finds itself. Very thin washes of color are then blended on top of the layers where, eventually, she will use a combination of oil mixed with dry pigment on the top surfaces until the piece has been fine-tuned, and has reached maturity. The weight of each piece is often indicative of how long it took to create, and it is not uncommon for a piece to take up to one year to complete.

Artists Statement
Terri thinks of each piece as in a state of constant movement and transformation-from a few abstract lines, which are always the beginning-to the top layers, which are more realistic. Layers represent "the way things were", and are built up to represent "the way things are", like scarring or years of passing in each character or "story" she does.