Terry Bearden was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in 1955 and grew up with five brothers and two sisters in an impecuniousness environment. This kept him from furthering his art career during his younger years. In 1967, he had his first experience in drawing when he drew a sketch in class. He never took any art classes in his early life and it was not until his sophomore year of high school that he took formal art training. During his senior year, he received a fifty dollar US bond after winning an art contest. In the same year, he moved in with his brother in Los Angeles and eventually sold his first piece of artwork after his brother recommended he try and sell his work. After high school, his brother helped convince him to pursue a higher education in art. Mr. Bearden was accepted into the Art Center College of Design in 1975, but he was unable to enter the field after he discovered how much his brother would have to borrow to put him through college.
Throughout all of these years, he continued painting and drawing extensively, which allowed him to develop his skills in order to create artwork with much more detail and further aided him in creating more refined renderings of his subjects. Growing up in the Central Valley of Northern California and feeling a great passion for this particular landscape, he decided to create work typically associated with the western art genre. After Mr. Bearden was forced to stop doing the physical work he had done most of his life, he decided to finish his degree and now wanted to paint and draw as he did when he was younger. Mr. Bearden graduated from Ashford University in 2009, completing his bachelor's degree in Organizational Management. He then decided to pursue his master’s degree at the Academy of Art University.
Today, Mr. Bearden has become very passionate about portraiture and feels very comfortable with, and without any trouble since most of first attempts was done in black and white. Today he likes painting more of the western gentry’s artwork. Mr. Bearden has done abstract, but prefers doing more realist abstract that he started doing in his youth. He still does a little abstract and can if asked. The one he did just recent was cowboy campfire showing a group of cowboys setting by the campfire, and painted to look like flaming fire itself. This is done with just an outline of the group and makes a statement.

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