One might assume that an artist whose paintings emanate a near-consuming passion for trees could be described as a landscape painter. But that's not the case for Georgia artist Tracey Lane. "If I say I paint landscapes," says Lane, "people get the wrong idea. If I say I paint trees, they get it." But semantic dilemmas fall away in the face of Lane's paintings—moody, tonal tree-scapes, often arranged in triptychs or groups of nine. "I don't really pay attention to what kind of tree I'm painting," she says. "I don't think, 'Oh, I want to paint that dogwood.' I'm mesmerized by the whole package—the way the light is hitting the tree rather than what kind of tree it is."
Lane, who works in acrylic on wood, begins a piece with a yellow ochre or raw sienna under-painting, into which she sometimes adds sand. She often scratches back down to this surface later, with her fingernails or a palette knife, to reveal a subterranean stratum that "peeks through" her paintings and makes quiet reference to the texture of bark.
Lane's interest in the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich and English impressionist J.M.W. Turner are evident. The fact that Lane wrote her master's thesis at Emory University in 1997 on Georgia O'Keeffe is also of note, as one can see parallels between O'Keeffe's connection to the landscape and Lane's relationship to trees, especially in the use of the external landscape to echo an inner personal landscape.
Lane is represented by Gallery One, Nashville, TN.