ABOUT TRACY

Tracy Algar began her artistic career in her late thirties while making plans to escape from an unhappy marriage. It was a means for her to express her feelings and make her plans while she wan’t able to speak about it.

She spent many hours poring over art on Pinterest, and after an initial period of self-doubt, finally plucked up the courage to sign up for a few workshops and classes with local artists. The self-doubt persisted through the first few years of learning to draw with Alex Downes, paint still lives with John-Clive Dawson-Squibb and a year of studying illustration at Ruth Prowse, as she constantly compared herself to her fellow students. The breakthrough came when in 2012, Tracy bought herself a 40th birthday present of a few small canvases and a selection of fluid acrylic paints, and instead of painting what she could see, set out to paint what she felt.

Over the next eight years, Tracy painted and sold her intuitive artworks online, starting her career as a professional artist by selling her work in an Etsy shop to collectors in the USA, the UK, Europe and Australia, and at a small market at a friend’s farmstall in Cape Town, to local collectors. Although that was a great way to start, she made use of a skill learned in her previous working life and built herself a website and started to spend more time marketing her art.

Although her work has changed considerably over the years, Tracy has always created her art with a focus on feelings, stories and experience, and considers her artistic endeavours to be a practice in knowing herself better and focusing on finding a depth of feeling and experience in everyday life.

Tracy now lives in a small village in the Overberg region of South Africa called Stanford, where she paints in her studio looking out on the Kleinriviersberg mountains.

When she is not painting in her studio, Tracy enjoys buildling websites for other artists and teaching art and marketing workshops to other creatives.

Video Channel

Watch more of my videos on my YouTube channel.

See: outdoor painting excursions, art demos and whatever else I make a video about (it’s  always art related).