Professional Focus

Christopher Terrell Moore, known as Artist Christopher Terrell, is an artist who specializes in circumstantial expressionism. Over the last twenty years, he has produced over a thousand pieces, showcased his paintings and other art forms at more than 100 shows, and has been written about extensively. 

Terrell’s art career began in middle school – drawing cartoon characters from his favorite comic books and selling them to his friends for lunch money. In high school, he was already recognized in state-wide competitions for his realistic style paintings that reflect the human condition in the south side of Raleigh. Shortly after that, he became very interested in facial expressions and dropped some of the traditional layout of the proportions that classically accompanies the painting of figures. This was the inception of the evolution of his unique interpretation of emotion referred to as circumstantial expressionism. It is a colorful style that tends to accentuate such bold emotions as love, peace, fear, and pain, as we see them appear in facial expressions on top of the context of the surrounding composition and subject matter. Through this work, Terrell taps into our internally shared experiences in life, both struggles and triumphs, with the goal of focusing on the more fundamental things that connect us over the more superficial externally experienced things that divide us.  

In his early years, to make ends meet, Terrell focused much of his attention on community activities and entrepreneurial ventures that promote art. He worked in such media as oil, canvases, murals, graphic drawings and illustrations. His entrepreneurial ventures brought him experiences in project and resource management, social media marketing, talent and content management, and community liaison work. In 2009 Terrell put together a year-long exhibit entitled “Art gallery: Home of the Obama Art Museum.” It showcased hundreds of creations by artists worldwide depicting President Obama – some in very creative forms, such as works made out of shoes or coins. (The exhibit prohibited political statements). From 2009 to 2012 Terrell created and operated “Hustle & Flow Community School of Hip-hop, R&B, and Art.” It was an organization that promoted school programs such as track-out, in-school programs, and special events. Its mission was to provide young people a place to learn and grow their creativity. In 2012, Terrell created the Raleigh Film & Art Festival. The festival is an annual event that showcases the most talented film directing and art work of young people from North Carolina and beyond. The festival draws many hundred submissions of which twenty are showcased in a space that holds about 500 ticket holders at any one time (Young film director, Cody Pyper, won the top award in 2017 in the category of Best Mid-length Film.) 

In “The Fragment,” Terrell applies his circumstantial expressionism to his interpretation of the fragment. He expresses the contrast between the particle and the fragment in terms of the human experience – with particles representing barren building blocks of nature, isolated from each other by the void of space and with fragments representing modern building blocks that permeate space, overlapping with one another, and conveying our shared intimacy. Through artistic expression, he tells the story of a modern science that is built on the best that logic and reason have to offer, the grandest of the arbitrators of morality, and he sees the union of art and science as bringing us together – art through its free expression of our emotional existence, allowing us to fly, and science through its honestly and logically agreed-upon description of our physical existence, giving us our grounding.