Tracey Adams

Tracey Adams is an American abstract painter and engraver. She currently lives and works in Carmel, California. She got a Barchelor's Degree from the Mount St. Mary College in Los Angeles in 1978. She studied engraving and painting at the School of Fine Arts in Boston from 1979 to 1981 and obtained a Master's Degree at the Conservatory of Music of New England in 1980. Tracey Adams has received several scholarships for her studies (including a scholarship by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in 2015).

Tracey Adam's pieces rely on the musical structure, rhythm and composition. Her choice of colors speaks to her personal environment... the light of the water, the suffocating power of fog, the colors of the setting sun and the palette of lush local flora are found in her work. While she was still a student, Tracey Adams often had the opportunity of working with composer and artist John Cage, who has strongly influence her work. She says her work tries to capture the calm and beauty of an environment that she will like to be part of.

Her work reflects a strong interest on musical motifs, rhythms, elements of lyrical composition and what she calls a sense of performance. Tracey Adams works on paper and boards, using a combination of paint, encaustic and graphite as well as elements of monotype and collage. Her creative process requires a lot of planning and intuition. She often starts a piece or a collection like an exact mathematical formula, by planning the details of the composition in advance. Other times, she starts by making a grid structure and then works on this structure, adding organic gestures, performative and very expressive brush strokes. The final result is often, a mixture of her original idea and her instinct, creating a composition that captures the essense of the harmony of mind and emotion.

Tracey Adams has exhibited her work a lot in solo and group exhibitions in the United States. Adams' work is part of permanent collections of several museums, such as those at the Bakersfield Museum of Art, the Monterey Museum of Art, the Fresno Art Museum, the Tucson Museum of Art and Santa Barbara the Museum of Art. Her work is also part of several corporate collections, including those in Adobe Systems, AT&T, Hallmark, Sony Corporation and Intel.