He has created some of the most iconic hockey artwork of his day, which is celebrated both locally and nationally. But as a native of South Saint Paul, Terrence Fogarty's inspiration for his work is thoroughly Minnesotan.

His paintings are all depictions of scenes he saw growing up, of kids playing at outdoor rinks, and attending St. Paul Johnson, whose hockey program is steeped in history. 

"I wasn’t an athlete but I observed it all growing up," Fogarty said. "Just living around here and knowing people whose kids are involved in hockey. So my inspiration was all around me growing up."

His process is simple -- capturing reference images with his camera, then heading back to the studio to put together the image he wishes to paint, sketching it all out, pencil on canvas. That's only about ten percent, or less, of the time he'll put into a single painting. The remaining 90 percent he devotes to applying paint and making the scene come alive. 

Minnesota Hockey caught up with Fogarty to talk about his inspiration behind a few of his pieces.

"(Starry Night) was really popular. So many people commented about that, that I thought you could apply that general idea to high school kids, or high school jerseys anyway. I put together a piece with St. Paul in the background. They’re very similar in look. The Sons of March, they all represent the prominent teams of the tournament since it started in 1945. There’s also some schools in there that maybe don’t make it to the tournament quite as much but are up-and-comers."

"Both of those, Star of the North and Homework, were shot in my old neck of the woods, by Phalen Park. I grew up a little further east, but both of those were inspired by what I saw growing up there. It wasn’t uncommon to see an outdoor mite tournament on any given weekend growing up. When I was growing up, high school varsity players would often be down on Saturday morning skating with us kids that maybe weren’t great athletes. You’d always see them down there playing pick-up games and such. You see a lot of that come out in my work."

"Oh yeah I’ve seen that scene many times before. The criticism I got on that piece is that the clock should have been different. It says about 8:30. People would come up and say ‘oh we’re regularly at the rink at 6 a.m. The spirit of it was what I was going for; wrestling the kids out of bed that early and trying to get them to get the skates on and get all the gear on. As tough as it is on the kids, it’s even tougher on the parents."

"That was completely off the top of my head. I don’t think I had a whole lot of specific visual reference that I went from on that piece, but I knew I wanted to do a night piece that had a skating rink. That was really improvised. That was just a scene that I had in my head that I put down on canvas."

"I wanted to do a military themed piece. But like with a lot of these pieces, I was looking for a model and I wanted a real military family to do this, because I had seen on TV all of the reunions of moms and dads coming home with the National Guard or Air Reserve. I wanted the capture that, but I knew I couldn’t do this piece without access to a real military type of situation. So I met a hockey family whose dad was deployed overseas and had made the trip back. They’ve experienced that so he was able to get me access to do some photo work out at the airport with a military plane. He had his family out there and I had them pose and model for me in a variety of ways. One of the things I wanted to do was make it simple but impactful. The embrace of the dad and his son, I thought that captured the spirit of what I was going for."

"I knew that they were going to do Hockey Day at Holman Field with the military setting, so that fit in nicely with the timing."

When it comes to picking out a favorite painting, the answer isn't easy for the artist.

"That’s a tough question," Fogarty said. "Usually it’s something recent because usually that’s what I’m most excited about or most interested in at the time. I would have to say that The Home Front is one of the more emotional paintings that I’ve done in a while. The feedback that I get on that piece has exceeded some of the previous paintings in the last couple of years. I know that when I hit home with the emotions with people, that’s something that I’m happy about. That’s probably my favorite to this point but there have been many; it’s hard to pick one."