August 2026 - Terri Dill-Simpson

This August, Dry Canyon Arts Association celebrates TerriDill-Simpson as its Featured Artist, a fitting honor for someonewhose creative life has been shaped not only by making art, but by teaching it, supporting it, and helping artists stay connected with each other and their greater community. A true Oregonian, Terri was born and raised in the Willamette Valley, in a family where creativity was part of ordinary life. As artists themselves, her parents and grandparents encouraged Terri to pursue her talents.

Terri went on to earn a degree in art education with a teaching degree in secondary education at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, where she also continued to work on a master’s degree. Two-thirds of the way through, Terri stopped as she was “so ready to get on with life.” Life did arrive, full and demanding, as Terri spent 37 years in Portland working in law enforcement security and safety management, much of that time connected with the Oregon Zoo. Her love of watercolor grew from a class she took at a community college, but it still had to share space with career and family.

Since moving to Redmond in 2016, Terri fully embraced her true passion: “His name is Art.” Watercolor is Terri’s medium of choice because, “It can be luminous, stubborn, transparent, and unpredictable, sometimes all in the same wash.” Most of all, Terri loves a challenge: observing beauty in nature and then trying to capture it with strokes from her brush.

In 2017 Terri joined Dry Canyon Arts Association. She has and continues to serve in a multitude of ways, as treasurer, board member, art classes and gallery committee chair, and as a member of the operations committee. She teaches a variety of classes in watercolor and in painting on glassware.

Terri’s newest collection includes paintings on ultra-smooth claybord, a surface new to her that allows pigment to rest on top of the semi-absorbent kaolin clay rather than sink deep into paper. The result is unusually clean, clear color, with the freedom to lift, rework, and refine. Two paintings in the gallery feature old twisty junipers and snags she seeks out on hikes through the tri-county area. Another honors the blue herons she watches each day as they fly across and through the canyon below her home. These capture a part of her “daily seeing.”

Her life and work remind us that an artistic adventure can expand over time—in dreams, classes, volunteer meetings, canyon walks, studio experiments, and the daily discipline of looking closely. She is also a member of the Watercolor Society of Oregon, the Oregon Society of Artists, Dry Canyon Artists of Central Oregon, and the Sisters Art Association.

For more information, please contact her at Terridillsimpson@gmail.com.