The Symmetry of Asymmetry:
Recent Encaustic Paintings by Tracey Adams

A painter, printmaker, and musician, Tracey Adams has consistently been drawn to art forms that are sympathetic to structure yet open to improvisation. Adams' ongoing absorption in the interplay of shape, color, and pattern has led her to create prints and paintings in which relationships of harmony and balance play a significant role. Reflective in nature, Adams' recent investigations into the mathematic expression of the proportional ratio found throughout nature that is known as the Golden Section or Golden Ratio have had a profound influence on her work. Throughout history, this ratio and the related numerical progression known as the Fibonacci sequence have produced focused inquiry and wonder in mathematicians, scientists, artists, and musicians. Both formulas provide means of recognizing and understanding the intricate harmonies and connections between all things.

Although she was drawn to both art and music from an early age, Adams initially chose to pursue music. (She holds a Master's Degree in conducting from the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.) The analytical and mathematical aspects of music attracted Adams, but her creative side has always been particularly attuned to the visual arts. While Adams sometimes wrestles with the aspect of her personality that is attracted to numbers and structure--feeling that logic and analysis can sometimes suppress the intuitive leaps crucial to the creative process--this characteristic nevertheless plays a significant role in her art. Even in Adams' earlier series of representational paintings, structure is a crucial element: circles, squares, rectangles, grids, and multiple panels enhance a sense of order and balance in paintings of simple iconic images isolated within semi-abstract backgrounds. While the earlier series of paintings contained representational images, abstraction has always been largely present in her work.

Adams' current move away from representation and the narrative implicit in her previous paintings corresponds with her interest in encaustic, an ancient medium in which pigments are added to a mixture of wax and resin. Labor intensive and notoriously hard to master, encaustic is also extremely rewarding visually. To remain pliable encaustic paint must be kept warm; once the artist begins to paint the solution starts to solidify. After each layer of paint, the artist applies heat to the wax surface. The heat melts the wax, causing it to bond with the previous layers and ultimately to the supporting panel. However, a moment's inattention can reduce a promising painting to an undistinguished puddle of wax. In building up the layers of her paintings, Adams creates areas of texture and color that are covered by additional paint. When she fuses the layers together the heat opens up these underlying areas in ways that are difficult to anticipate or control. With encaustic Adams has discovered a balance of structure and chaos that seems to suit her perfectly.

Until Jasper Johns began to experiment with encaustic in 1954, the medium was little known in contemporary art. Initially drawn by its fast drying time, Johns continued to use encaustic for its outstanding tactile qualities. Recent advances in tools and materials have fueled a rapidly growing interest in the exceptional properties of this medium. Unlike oil or acrylic-based paints that maintain varying levels of transparency, wax creates a surface that is itself translucent. Light passes through the painting and reflects back toward the surface, giving the appearance of illumination from within. Given encaustic's unique relationship to light, and subsequently to color, it is hardly surprising that this medium has widely inspired artists such as Adams who are searching for fresh means of expression.

The textures and richness of color possible with encaustic have led Adams to pare her visual vocabulary down to the bare bones. Focusing on geometric abstraction rather than the open-ended narrative suggested by her more representational works, Adams has freed her paintings from tangible spatial relationships and therefore from any sense of scale. By divesting her paintings of storyline, Adams has expanded their parameters. Without a given context, her geometric shapes and subsurface patterns simultaneously evoke both the microcosm and the macrocosm. In paintings such as Counting to 42 , Adams' patterned circular shapes create an expansiveness not feasible with direct representation; whether they are interpreted as amoebic life forms or distant nebulae, all possibilities are inherent.

While Adams' artwork continues to evolve as she moves through a range of mediums and styles, balanced harmonies of shape and color have been constant in her work. Of pivotal importance to her current work is the idea that root harmonies exist throughout the natural world and that they can be expressed mathematically. Theories of proportional harmony have existed since the days of the ancient Egyptians. The most influential theories were espoused by the followers of ancient Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras, who believed that the consistent mathematical proportions found throughout nature and society, which they termed the Golden Section, make evident a divine order in the universe.

Many artists and architects have used the Golden Section to impart balanced proportions that are particularly harmonious and pleasing to the eye. These ideas are also apparent in the mathematical basis and structure of music. In the Golden Section and related theories, Adams has found confirmation of what she previously sensed and articulated in nature-derived patterns in her work, that all things are interconnected. Her deepening understanding has led her to bypass the images from nature prevalent in her earlier work and go instead directly to nature. In the current series she has fused seedpods, spiral fossils of ammonites, and small pebbles directly onto her panels. Through these natural objects and her ordered placement of them, Adams directs our eye to the endless patterns that can be found in nature, to the seeming asymmetric parts that make up a symmetrical whole.

The breadth and consistency of the proportions found in patterns of growth indicate that such uniform mathematical relationships are not coincidence, but evidence of an overall pattern of harmony that is intrinsic to our very beings. It may be that since we too embody the Golden Section--in our bodies, our faces, even our DNA structure--we are physiologically destined to appreciate the beauties of proportion on a subconscious level. It is possible that we cannot escape the visual satisfaction experienced from a beautiful design, whether it is the Parthenon, or a pinecone. By recognizing and celebrating these ideas, Adams shares her wonder of the underlying harmonies of life, pointing out that, like her collaged seeds or fossil shells, we too are part of a larger pattern. Adams reminds us that from our limited perspective a sense of overarching symmetry is hard to perceive: what appears asymmetrical from one point of view can be seen as perfectly symmetrical if only we can find the right perspective.

Mary Murray

Former Curator, Monterey Museum of Art