Ranging from fiery bright colors to muted tones executed with bold strokes, northern New Mexico artist, Tracy Turner’s southwest paintings turn desert, mountain, mesa and canyonland scenes into magical places on board and canvas, using a variety of media, including oil, giclee and pastels.

With a color palette that ranges from bright reds, yellows and oranges to rich blues, greens and purples, Tracy paints colorful, cheerful and interesting high energy images of the Southwest that take you into enchanting places - where streams flow into mysterious canyons and glowing deserts dotted with multi-colored sagebrush are nestled beneath wild feathery, and sometimes anthropomorphic clouds.

Although her work ranges from paintings of French architecture and landscapes to still life, we chose to focus on her Southwest work for this story.

A native of the West, her work testifies to her, “great passion for wild places” and her, “love for the infinite ways color and light manifest with form.”

Starting many of her paintings on location, Tracy then finishes them in her studio, where she infuses them with her own impressionistic interpretations inspired by memories of the original scenes.

She adds depth, color saturation  and "inner light" to her paintings with a glazing technique, by which she adds layers of color to the surfaces.

Tracy’s work has been influenced by many great artists, including Van Gogh, Georgia O'Keefe, Canadian painters - Emily Carr and Lawren Harris, the great Russian mystic painter Nicholas Roerich, and noted photographer, Ansel Adams. She says she admires their, “bold expressions of color and light, and their reverence for nature.” She describes her own work as, “a visual narrative of the beauty I see everywhere."

Tracy discovered the joy of plein-air painting - a style of painting produced out of doors in natural light - when she studied at the Leo Marchutz School of Painting and Drawing at Aix-en-Provence in
France.

While in Europe, she traveled throughout the countryside of southern France and northern Italy, doing paintings in some of the favorite locales of Van Gogh, Cezanne and the Fauve painters.

Tracy continued her education at the Portland School of Art in Portland, Maine, and at the College of Art and Design in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she was a recipient of an Abbey Weed Grey scholarship.

She then entered the commercial world and worked on editorial, fine art publishing, and print advertising projects as a fine art illustrator.

Her work has received national and international recognition through numerous publications and gallery exhibitions and many of her paintings reside in private collections in the United States and Europe.

Tracy’s work is currently exhibited at the Palette Contemporary Art and Craft gallery in Albuquerque, Gallerie Corazon on Canyon Road in Santa Fe, and at her Arroyo Seco studio by appointment.

She will soon offer prints from her own website. Giclee prints will range in price from $60 for an 8 1/2" x 11" to $800 for a 30"x40" print. They will be printed with archival inks on archival paper, hand signed and numbered in small editions.

Tracy now makes her home with her family in Arroyo Seco, a village near Taos in Northern New Mexico.

 

More of Tracy Turner's
work can be seen at:


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