Quartet in the Key of Joy

Ann Tracy (°1951, Waltham MA, United States) is an artist who works in a variety of media including monotypes, digital art, photography, painting, encaustics, video and theatre (actor, director, playwright). She is a native New Englander who grew up in the Maine towns of Fryeburg and Cape Neddick before her family moved south to Massachusetts and then west to Colorado in 1969. After decades of living in Colorado, Wisconsin and California, Tracy is now calling Rockport, Maine home with her husband. She is a founding member of the Midcoast Chapter of Union of Maine Artists, Monotype Guild of New England, Maine Art Gallery in Wiscasset and Professional Women Photographers (NY).

"I'm a big fan of ambiguity and chance in making art, since my salad days as a modern dancer (early 1970s) and learning Merce Cunningham’s theory of Chance Dance and about the work of the Dadaists. I also use conceptual and methodological approaches borrowed from my other life practices of performance, theater, dance, and journalism. In calling myself a digital alchemist, I'm trying to reference both a classical past and a forward reaching future in which images with one meaning are combined with others to create new and poetic meanings. It's as if I'm being called home to a dream world in which fiction and reality meet, meanings shift, past and present fuse.  Sometimes I like the photograph the way it is, then the manipulations are more focused on heightening the impact via color, design and emotional context. But other images call out to be a basis for combining unrelated aspects which many times lead to surprising analogies. In my abstract painting, I'm guided by Spirit and Energy of the colors I choose. And the same can be said about the encaustic and monotypes I make once more."

Tracy’s fine art has been exhibited from Japan to Maui to New York City to Spain and Budapest, Hungary. She was a 2014, 2015 and 2016 finalist in the Julia Margaret Cameron competition and was invited to exhibit at the 3rd Photographic Biennale in Malaga, Spain 2014, as well as the Berlin Foto Biennial 2016.  In 2003 her work, “Stop” was included in the catalog of the “Violence Against Women” exhibition, Group 78 Amnesty International, Tokyo, Japan. Her digital paintings “The Power of Romania Lies in its Artists” and “Message 3” were juried into the 2010 and 2008 editions of “American Art Collector”. She presented a creativity workshop to feature writers at the Sacramento Bee, a daily newspaper in 2008. Tracy has also worked as an art expert for KVIE CH 6 (PBS Sacramento) for the 2010 Art Auction and was featured in Sacramento Magazine in November 2010 (http://www.sacmag.com/media/Sacramento-Magazine/November-2010/City-Sketch-Ann-Tracy/).

Her work is found online at the following sites:     htps://ann-tracy.pixels.com/

https://anntracy.substack.com/     https://www.etsy.com/shop/AnnTracyFineArt

Contact her at: [email protected]