Winter Salon 2024

STATEMENT
As a professional painter for forty-five years, I express my emotions through composition, color, value, light, line, volume and space. My process is contemplative—less the physical frenzy that informed my early work which was a result of my traditional art education. In the last twenty years, I have sought to
move beyond, to try to ‘forget,’ some of my earlier assumptions. Now my narrative is more focused, and my paintings have ‘simplified’, and yet are also more specific. Each painting holds a process of concentrated exploration over a period, a building of abstract emotion on a two-dimensional plane. I begin each painting from life, but then the painting process takes over and I only bring the model back for drawing and color information. In recent years, my body of work has often included dogs. I paint about their fidelity in a world that lacks this. For many, the embodiment of true constancy is the dog, who sits and watches and loves.

My plan is to continue this exploration of humanity and find beauty in this troubled world. The ultimate goal for my next body of work is to focus on giving ourselves permission to feel all the ups and downs of politics, aging, personal growth and differences in opinion in these complicated times. My paintings and drawings are mostly about being a woman, often autobiographical, about life and circumstances, yet my goal is to invite the viewer to bring their own experience as well, where hopefully we can begin to heal together. The pandemic gave me the time to enable me to push my boundaries creatively and take risks in seeing differently and in new ways, both emotionally and pictorially. I want to continue to push this as far as I can in the years I have left.

BIO
Tracy Burtz is a mid career painter. She was born in NY and lived in Paris for five years after completely her studies. She received her BFA from Boston University School for the Arts in 1978 and her MFA from CUNY Queens College in 1980. She also studied at The New York Studio School Paris Program in 1978.

Burtz has shown her work extensively and has had eighteen solo shows and has been in more than forty five group shows. She has been represented by galleries in NYC, Paris, Middlebury VT, Greenwich CT, West Palm Beach, Taos NM, Atlanta GA , Scarsdale NY, and Nantucket MA. Burtz was a finalist for the 2023 Alexander Putsch Award. She lives and works in Pleasantville, NY