Terry Metzler

Becoming an ArtistMy storyMetzler was born in California and lived there with her parents and two siblings until moving to North Carolina when she was four. Most of her early school years were spent in North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee until her parents found a permanent home in Georgia. She has lived in the Metro Atlanta area since she was 8 years old and currently resides in Decatur with her husband, Mike and their cat Ziggy. She started as a double major in college—, Art and Physical Education. At the end of her junior year she decided to focus on pursuing a degree in HPE. She had a long successful career in teaching HPE first at the at the elementary level before continuing her successful career as an instructor in Physical Education Teacher Education at Georgia State University. After 31 years in the teacher retirement system, she retired and returned to the university to work part time for an additional 7 years before leaving GSU and working for HealthMPowers, a nonprofit as a health educator until she retired in 2018. All the while; she dabbled in her artwork but always knew that she would need to fully retire to be able to focus all of her energy on her artistic journey. A decision to participate in a Plein Air event in 2018 and to take a pastel workshop taught by Greg Barnes inspired her to become a pastelist after many years of working mostly in watercolor. As an emerging artist, she has found that her love of nature, movement, dance, music and color are beginning to have a voice with pastel. Since that first Plein Air, she has participated in as many events as she can and has taken in person workshops from Karen Margulis and Marsha Savage and online workshops with Larry Moore. Currently, she is taking private lessons from Marsha Savage, her mentor.