In her paintings, Tracey Sylvester Harris presents a dazzling aqueous vision of California that merges the past with the present.

Harris began working with photographic source material as inspiration for her art in 2008. Anonymous snapshots found at flea markets, yard sales, and on the internet provide the diving board for her transformation of black and white memories into dazzling light and color. Her first one-person exhibition inspired by these found images was Lost Holiday at the Campton Gallery in New York in 2009. Following that, she experimented with imagery of women that was derived predominantly from films made in the forties and fifties. Those works depicted women mostly as torsos, or cropped stills. Harris titled that series, Noir, after the film genre. Suspended in time, they have been captured smoking, waking, sleeping, and sitting in contemplation. With the context of their actions removed, the women become mysterious. Dressed in swimsuits or lingerie, they are alluring not for their bodies, but the secrets they hold.

Harris states, “The exciting challenge is to keep the paintings relevant and current even though the subjects come from another era. To avoid sentimentality, I keep the compositions bold and cropped, the paintwork loose, drippy and rough, even pushing some areas into abstraction….”

The paintings are colorful but bittersweet in their depictions of fleeting moments of summer captured almost a lifetime ago. The leisure time of the past in these paintings is an elegant era – one of stylish red swimsuits, flowered white caps, and scarlet lipstick. Looking closely at the paintings however, reveals Harris’s true theme.