ABOUT TRACY

I began my artistic career in my late thirties during a period of self-discovery and while planning my exit strategy from an unhappy marriage. To begin with, art was a means for me to express my feelings in a non-verbal way as well as a way to visually lay out my plans while I wasn’t able to speak about it.

With no formal art training and a large quantity of self-doubt, it took me a while to pluck up the courage to join 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 I constantly compared myself to fellow students. A breakthrough came when in 2012 when I bought myself a 40th birthday present of a few small canvases and a selection of fluid acrylic paints. Instead of painting what I could see, I set out to paint what I felt.

Since then I have created art with a focus on feelings, stories and experience. My art reflects my busy mind and my deep curiosity to know more and look deeper. I paint in layers, slowly bringing order and sense to a visual tale that unfolds on the canvas. My painting process is spontaneous. I work intuitively with colour and line in a range of mediums, including acrylic paint, PITT oil based pencil, ink and oil pastel. Many of my artworks contain happy accidents created by the adding of layers and the making of marks, and the subtracting of parts of the painting by colour blocking.

I use marks and colour to represent how I feel and my experiences of being in the world. Some of the marks are random and some have a specific repetitive form. They are my marks, representing the way I see and feel things.

“My painting embraces intuition and represents a dialogue with my inner world.”

Workshops

2015 – 2019

2-day Creative Self-Expression workshops
Stanford, Hermanus and Wolseley

Online Workshops

A self-paced intuitive art workshop created in 2017 is available online.

Collected worldwide

USA
Canada
Australia
France
Germany
England
Wales
Isle of Man
South Africa
Namibia
Malawi