As a teenager, Terry Hayes got a small start in flying by working weekends at a local airport. He washed airplanes, changed oil, gassed them up, carried luggage, biked to the restaurant for take-outs and, in general, did the grunt work at the airport in exchange for ten or fifteen minutes of flight instruction per week.  This was what is known in the trade as “touch and goes.” The student takes off, flies around the square pattern and lands without stopping – then takes off and goes around – repeat –.

In Hayes’ early school books there are movies of flying airplanes.  In the margins of the pages he drew tiny sketches of airplanes, each a little different from the one before, rolling or spinning. So that when released from under the thumb, the flipping pages produced a tiny sketch of an airplane which appeared, in succession, to be stunting in a loop, a roll, a spin.

He got his start in commercial art in a large department store, Maison Blanche, in New Orleans.  The art director in the advertising section, gave him assignments in illustrating ladies’ purses and shoes, sporting goods and furniture – anything with hard lines and slick finishes.  At home in his spare time he painted action scenes from World War I aviation, researching particular paint jobs and serial numbers, everything for authenticity in the works.  He painted over twenty of these and put on a one-man show, which was written up in the New Orleans Times Picayune newspaper.

 

He got a letter from the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle a month after the article appeared in the local paper asking, if Hayes could send some paintings up to him. He would pick up the tab for the shipping and arrange for the gallery to show them.  Hayes was delighted to accept the offer.  The exhibit turned out tro be a two-man show with World War II paintings by Alfred Owles, some forty paintings in all, which sold out.

 

Then the Department of Health in New Orleans appealed to the people to support an effort to control the spread of mosquitoes.  The pests were discouraging to tourists in a major degree.  George Carmichael came to town and spoke of establishing a new department in the Board of Health and was enthusiastically endorsed by the people of the city.  Hayes was hired as the first pilot to come to work in the effort.  He flew for the next seven years at that occupation.

Hayes left New Orleans in 1977 to pursue a new career in California.  He settled in Oakland and painted a series of illustrations of the Reno Air Races.  After a one-man show at the Oakland Airport he moved to San Diego and the Reno series of race scenes was placed in the Aerospace Museum in Balboa Park where they remain in the permanent collection.

Hayes wrote a book about his adventures, a roman a clef, which he titled, “Make It Look Easy.” It is a fictionalized treatment of his flying in the Big War and his crop dusting and spraying up until the time he went to work for the Health Department of New Orleans, attempting to wipe out the mosquito. View some of Terry's illustrations for "Make it Look Easy" in the Action section of the site.

At present, Hayes is engaged in an advertising campaign which features forty paintings of the famous landmarks of the world; the Statue of Liberty, Niagara Falls, the Eiffel Tower, Macchu Pichu, Altamira Cave Art, Stonehenge, the Goodyear Blimp – it’s a landmark of the world – there’s no end of subjects.