Guy Hepner Gallery

Terry Urban Ol' Girl Blues For Sale

Terry Urban
Terry Urban - Ol' Girl Blues, 2025, Acrylic, oil, pastel, ink, aerosol on canvas

Ol' Girl Blues, 2025

Acrylic, oil, pastel, ink, aerosol on canvas

60 x 48 in

About this work

Terry Urban's "Ol' Girl Blues" commands attention through its layered materiality and raw emotional presence. The canvas pulses with a complex interplay of media—acrylic and oil providing structural depth, while pastel and ink introduce gestural immediacy and aerosol adds atmospheric diffusion. Urban's characteristic approach to mixed media creates a surface that feels simultaneously weathered and urgent, as though the work has absorbed years of lived experience while remaining viscerally present. The composition balances figuration and abstraction, with forms emerging from and dissolving into fields of color that shift between melancholic blues and warmer undertones. There is a sense of narrative withheld, a story suggested but never fully told, which invites prolonged contemplation. The title itself evokes both affection and lament—the familiar weight of memory, loss, or longing rendered in pigment and spray. Urban's practice consistently explores the tension between control and spontaneity, between the deliberate mark and the accidental drip. In "Ol' Girl Blues," this tension manifests as a kind of visual blues music—improvisational, soulful, rooted in tradition yet distinctly contemporary. The scale of the work, at sixty by forty-eight inches, allows these qualities room to breathe, creating an immersive experience that rewards both distance and close inspection. Emotionally, the piece operates in a register of reflective melancholy tempered by resilience, offering viewers a space to sit with complexity rather than resolution. The work exemplifies Urban's ability to transform personal expression into universal resonance. For inquiries regarding the acquisition of "Ol' Girl Blues," please contact Guy Hepner gallery directly.

Price on Application

Edition & Provenance

Year
2025
Medium
Acrylic, oil, pastel, ink, aerosol on canvas

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Ol' Girl Blues

About Terry Urban

Terry Urban was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and moved to San Diego after high school to pursue skateboarding, where he was first introduced to turntablism. He returned to Cleveland to work as a DJ, later landing a role at Sirius Satellite Radio, before relocating to New York City in 2006 to focus on music full time. He built a career producing mixtapes, including Viva la Hova, Southerngold, and Biggie Stardust, earning recognition from artists including Jay-Z, Coldplay, and Drake.

In 2015, after more than a decade in the music industry, Urban returned to painting, treating it as a new creative outlet and eventually a full-time practice. His work is bold and gestural, combining vibrant color with symbolic, often somber imagery, including skulls, bones, and fragmented figures that speak to mortality, resilience, and inner conflict. Despite the weight of his subject matter, his paintings carry an underlying sense of energy and momentum, shaped by the same restless drive that carried him through skateboarding and music.

Urban brings a disciplined, almost ritualistic approach to his studio practice, working extended painting sessions often set against music or film. His path from street culture to music to visual art has become part of his artistic identity, and his work resonates as a document of reinvention as much as a body of paintings.

Guy Hepner works with collectors seeking Terry Urban's bold, symbolic paintings shaped by his path through music and street culture. Contact us to discuss available inventory or to inquire about upcoming releases.

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