Tracey Adams

Obligation to Retreat (Abstract Painting)

2016

Tracey Adams is an American abstract painter and printmaker. Her artworks reflect a strong interest in musical patterns, rhythms, lyrical compositional elements and what she calls a sense of performance. She lives and works in Carmel, California. Work by Adams is part of the permanent collections of several museums, including the Bakersfield Art Museum, the Monterey Museum of Art, the Fresno Art Museum, the Tucson Art Museum, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Her work is also part of multiple corporate collections, including those of Adobe Systems, AT&T Corporate Headquarters, Hallmark Corporate Headquarters, Sony Corporation, and Intel. Tracey is a contemporary artist that's known for creating artworks at the intersection of "art, math, and music."1 Being a former musician herself, Tracey Adams often uses rhythm to explore relationships between people and objects. The influence of music is visible in the artist's highly rhythmical artworks that often include visual intervals, patterns, and similar references. Mathematics, on the other hand, is employed to pre-determine a number of colors that will be used when creating an artwork, the number of times they will appear and the way they will be aligned in the compositions.