Color & Brevity: Tracey Helgeson

by Anthony Merino

Brevity breeds meaning. In austere images, what details are included become significant. American landscape painters like William Merritt Chase, Edward Hopper and Richard Diebenkorn evoked complex emotional narratives with minimal details. Tracey Helgeson continues this tradition through her economic landscapes, displayed at Harrison Gallery in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

The artist exhibited two groups of landscapes; those with buildings and those without. Both trigger a sense of melancholia in the audience. An aura of isolation permeates the works with buildings. In a few pieces like Flat Road with Farm and Flash of Pink, the artist uses scale and placement to create a narrative of separation. Both works depict a small house on the periphery of the picture, which are overwhelmed by the vast landscapes that surround them. Helgeson uses an almost subliminal image to create a sense of removal in Green Acres, showing a bright red barn in the foreground and a cluster of houses in the background. The bare, wireless post near the barn creates a sense of disconnection. Even in paintings with a large and central image like Great Amish Barn, the buildings have a sense of being more separate than part of their environment. Helgeson masterfully uses color to create a vastness of depth in the image. The barn may consume three quarters of the image’s width, yet it inhabits only a fraction of the image’s depth.

The exhibition includes a few bare landscapes. The best of these pieces are almost hypnotic. Helgeson engages the viewer through outrageous and alluring use of color. Color Field 104-107, a landscape comprised of four panels, epitomizes seduction through color. Helgeson reduces a landscape into three bands: a blue sky, a green tree line, and four different colored fields: mustard, pink, green and blue. These result in a reduction as beautiful, albeit ominously so, as Diebenkorn.

The more Helgeson’s images are considered, the more complex they become. Swatches of color that seem flat at first reveal themselves to be layered. Images that seem simple and didactic become complex and nuanced. This results in arrestingly simple images.
 

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Image Credit: Images courtesy of tracyhelgeson.com.
________________________________________________________________________________________________

Anthony Merino is based in western Massachusetts and has published and lectured about art internationally.