Art & Critique

Tracy Helgeson

Tracy Helgeson’s artwork comprises relatively few elements: pure and saturated colors, often astonishingly intense; trees, barns and roads; well-marked lines, diagonal or straight; and a great deal of imagination that helps to organize all of these features into clean and straightforward compositions. In a way, her pieces can be compared to the first machines, which consisted of a few parts — but never failed to perform. Although all parts are indispensable, color often steps in as the main painterly propeller: the mentioned objects do not require much detail and palette naturally takes precedence. As a result, many paintings carry a powerful emotional load that the intense colors emanate. Tracy prefers warm, sometimes outright hot yellows, reds and purples; she willingly experiments with value, particularly with shade, which adds a touch of dusky mysticism to the colors, while retaining their unusual intensity. I believe that her unorthodox palette might be her most important artistic accomplishment — one that many artists spend careers on achieving.

Looking at the artist’s paintings is a gratifying experience because they convey emotional depth while remaining fundamentally unpretentious. Wide areas of color, of subdued, almost subconscious vibrancy, are allowed to affect viewers to the fullest possible extent. Thus, the red barns refer to the blood and tears of hard work that it took to fill the premises, the purple trees suggest an autumnal sadness, and loneliness, and the tinted blues and yellows instill universal calm and confidence. Rural scenes tend to become tedious, but Tracy effortlessly eschews repetition, and she does it with a light, often ironic touch: she will slant the houses and the barns to expose their comical, awkward side, and she will break a grove into several groups of trees, a different color assigned to each one, to imply rivalry — these devices generate interest, and make the viewer feel that s/he enters an untapped territory. The artist covers a wide emotional range, balancing earnestness arising from the palette with compositional cheerfulness.

The underlying theme of Tracy’s artwork is harmony: painterly formal, as well as general, of people with nature. It seems that the former kind, achieved by technique and skill, proclaims the latter, as possible and attainable. These paintings demonstrate how artificial structures can blend with nature. Sometimes, it is difficult to determine whether the focus of the attention should be the building or the tree beside it, the grove or the field before it. This is a strangely clear ambiguity, because it becomes quite obvious what (among other themes) the artist is trying to tell the viewer. There is no conflict between the angular shapes of the barns and the round-like tree crowns; on the contrary, they often replicate each other, as the artist delineates the foliage by a series of lines which we tend to interpret as familiar ovals. The artist treats a customary artistic device as a means rather than a goal; social and political message may overrule the aesthetic effect. But it also may not — that depends on the viewer. Either way, this many-sided appeal makes Tracy’s artwork both original and durable.

Tracy Helgeson lives and works in Upstate New York and keeps a website and a blog.

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Read Related Reviews:

• Tracy Helgeson: Fields
• Tracy Helgeson: A May Day
• Tracy Helgeson: Dark Blue Barn
• Tracy Helgeson: Byzantine Blue Road

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 at 8:36 pm and is filed under Daily/Frequent Painters, Tracy Helgeson. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.