Here the expanse of open space marks a departure from Tracy Helgeson’s usual themes in rural landscape: large groups of trees, impressive barns, powerful color contrasts. This piece is almost an opposite of the crowded “Dark Blue Barn,” where space can hardly breathe, so confined it becomes by the barns and the trees. Together, these [...]
The schematic simplicity of this landscape approaches abstraction, with only the tentative contours of the trees revealing familiar figurative shapes. The darkest area of this painting is also the deepest: the receding trunks and the nearly black, murky space in-between recreate the sense of a proper, deep forest, where one can easily get lost, yet [...]
A crowded composition unfolds before the viewer. Two of the most prominent elements from the artist’s arsenal spread on the panel: the barns and the trees; they interact dynamically, both in color and placement. I think that this piece can be divided into two acts, the main one happening in the foreground — it presents [...]
Tracy Helgeson’s trademark devices — vibrant and contrasting colors, slants, and basic geometric shapes — continue to play a chief role in this painting. The road divides the composition into two, acting as a type of “no man’s land” between the hot orange grove — apparently the one lit by a rising sun — and [...]
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 [...]
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