Morris, Elise. Tracey Adams, Studio Visit. The Studio Work. March 21 st, 2016. http://thestudiowork.blogspot.com/2016/03/tracey-adams-studio-visit.html MAR 21 Tracey Adams Studio Visit I had the pleasure of visiting Tracey Adams in her home studio, where she creates paintings and mixed-media pieces that are at once orderly and organic, infused with color and movement, often in the elusive medium of encaustic. As she says "My mind is very organized and I enjoy geometric structure, while at the same time, I love to draw in an unrestricted and intuitive way with lots of physical movement." We talked about how you are in the midst of creating a new series of work exciting! Tell us more! My new series, GUNA, was begun in early December as a way to break away from the precision and geometric work I've been doing for many years: the Revolution, Lumenis and FOLDED series. Those series are about patterns we see in math, music and in nature. It is very closely detailed work, especially the hand cutting, folding, stitching and measuring of washi (Japanese paper) that has been dipped in hot pigmented wax; these processes involve a slower, quieter way of working, but wreak havoc on my neck and eyes.
I needed to break away and free myself from the constraints of working with the precise circle and ovoid, to work more intuitively. I hadn't intended for it to go anywhere except to be playful, to loosen up. I started working with unpredictable combinations of colors, melting the pigmented wax on my hotbox and dipping the washi in it multiple times. Sometimes I would start painting ink on paper and add gouache or watercolor to the wax forms. There was no planning and no intention except to work more intuitively. I didn't have any deadlines or shows on the horizon except for a group show so I knew I could sustain this for a few months.
Can you talk about your creative process? How do you find inspiration for a painting or series of new works? How is color part of that? Inspiration comes from several sources. I live near the Pacific ocean and walk along the beach everyday - all the beautiful limb-like forms of seaweed and algae find their way into my work as do the colors of the water, sky and tree forms. Beyond that, my early and university training was in music; I have always been interested in the vibrations of color and hue and how one color can look a certain way next to another, only to have it change when placed next to a different color. I've studied Albers' writings and work and have done a lot of experimenting with unusual combinations of my own. In my new series, color is the "glue" or focus that holds each piece together. I'm enjoying working with organic shapes and negative/positive spaces along the edges. I've been a working artist for 30+ years and know that I'll never run out of inspiration. I find iterations for new series when revisiting older work, each time the result is different. I love how all of these things connect to each other.
You work with encaustics, which have a different process than most other painting mediums how did you become interested in that way of working? During my first art residency, in 1994 at the Vermont Studio Center, I met Richard Frumess, the owner of R&F Paints. He came to my studio and showed me pigment sticks and started. I was at Michael David's show at Knoedler in NY in the mid-90's; around that time he was exhibiting enormous encaustic paintings, ones where hot pigmented wax was poured on each panel.
I was struck by the luminosity and translucency of the surface, not to mention the sheer scale of these gorgeous paintings. I took the first workshop offered in the Bay Area by R&F Paints in 1997 and have been working with encaustic since that time. I then took a 2
year hiatus from encaustic to work with acrylic in 2012. I love the combination of organic shapes and materials, along with a certain orderliness or geometry that is often found in your work. What do they mean to you? Thanks, Elise. I work on a continuum of organic gesture to geometry, sometimes moving more to one end of the continuum then the other. They represent two distinct, but very real sides of who I am. My mind is very organized and I enjoy geometric structure, while at the same time, I love to draw in an unrestricted and intuitive way with lots of physical movement. The challenge comes in trying to merge both cohesively. What is your dream project if time (or space for that matter) wasn t a limit? Recently, I received a very generous Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Prior to that, in 2014, I heard a fascinating interview on KQED with Dr. Roger Linington, then a chemistry professor at UCSC. He was discussing his project, Medicines from the Sea, his collection of specimens from the ocean which are placed in Petri dishes that have been treated with diseased cells (cancer, MS,
AIDS, etc). I was interested and excited by what he was doing and noted that the imagery posted was similar to what I had been experimenting with. I asked to visit him in his lab at UCSC and subsequently made several trips. One of them involved photographing Petri dishes under the microscope. Currently, I am working on a collaborative project with a Denver-based sculptor, someone I exhibited with at the Andy Warhol
Museum in Slovakia many years ago. We're allowing the evolution of the project to move slowly and organically before we're able to write a proposal for an exhibition. How and where this goes is my dream project. What show are you working toward, and where can we see your work in the Bay Area and beyond? I'm curating a show, PAPER: burned, cut, folded and stitched at the Bryant Street Gallery which opens April 1. I have a solo there in October. I'm in a two person show in Washington DC next March.
A list of galleries that represent my work with can be found on my website. Posted 21st March by Elise Morris