We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Tracy Spadafora a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Tracy, appreciate you joining us today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?
I fell in love with visual art as a child and as I continued to focus on art in my youth, I knew it was my calling. As a visual learner I was always drawn to visual images, and I seemed to have a natural facility for drawing, which helped to feed my passion for art early on. Creating art also gave me a sense of inner peace and accomplishment that I couldn’t get in any other way. While I concentrated on art in high school, I became certain that I wanted to study art in college. I did have concerns about how I would make a living in the arts, so instead of going to an art school, I chose to study art at a university, which allowed me to get a broader education. As I was able to seriously focus my attention on visual art at Boston University, and was surrounded by other creative, like-minded people, my passion and commitment to art only got stronger. By the time I graduated from college, I knew that I wanted to pursue art professionally. Although I acknowledged it would be challenging, and would take much determination and persistence, I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.
Tracy, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I am a professional visual artist and art instructor currently living in Westborough, MA. I earned a BFA from Boston University with a major in painting and a minor in art history, and an MFA from the State University of New York in New Paltz with a concentration in painting. As a creative, I work primarily as a 2D artist, focusing on drawing, painting, collage, and assemblage. Over the years, I have explored themes in my artwork that have addressed the human relationship to the environment. My newest series, called “Left Behind”, consists of pastel drawings, and paintings made with oil and encaustic paint. In this series I explore the concept of transformation and the passage of time through peeling paint, rusting metal, and other processes of corrosion and decay. While collecting reference images for this series I became intrigued by garbage dumpsters, observed behind office buildings, strip malls, and on construction sites. I started to photograph, draw, and paint the surfaces of the dumpsters as a way of documenting the layers of wear, searching for a history within the marks. Dumpsters, containers of waste, are ubiquitous yet often unnoticed. As I examine the rich colors, textures, and marks on the surface of these containers, sometimes including their identifying numbers, I create new “landscapes” that embody the detritus of our place and time, and act as a record of the human footprint on our environment. As mentioned, I am also an art instructor. By my mid-twenties, I realized that I wanted to show my work in galleries, but I didn’t want the stress of having to sell my work to earn a living, so I went back to school for an MFA so I could teach art at the college level. In the years since I graduated from graduate school, I have been an adjunct instructor at Quincy College for 24 years, I co-owned an art studio that offered youth art classes, I taught adult education classes, and I have specialized in a painting technique called encaustic. Encaustic, which is an ancient technique that dates to the 1st Century AD, uses paint that is made with beeswax and pigment that must be heated and melted to work with. I use encaustic in my own artwork and have taught workshops in encaustic painting for 27 years at venues throughout the northeastern United States. In teaching art, I found an art-related career that has been incredibly rewarding and has allowed me time to create my own work. While being a studio artist can be a solitary practice, teaching allows me an opportunity to connect with people and to give back. I made it my mission early on to promote the appreciation for the arts in my classes. I realized that if I could educate students, both youth and adult, about the value of art, I could help to encourage their future support for the arts. Being able to earn my income by teaching has also allowed me the freedom to create art in my studio that is meaningful and fulfilling to me, and not just something that will sell.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
There are many rewarding aspects to being a visual artist. For me, it starts in the studio with self-reflection and experimentation, and often requires me to apply skill, knowledge, and/or intuition to solve creative problems or technical challenges. The process of creating can open you up to your innermost thoughts and feelings, which is both therapeutic and empowering. To be able to convey complex ideas or feelings through visual imagery and make an intellectual or emotional connection with the viewer is the ultimate reward, and a great motivator in the studio. I have also been teaching studio art classes for 30 years, so it has been very rewarding to educating my students about art and to teach them the skills to create their own. There is a great feeling of satisfaction and purpose when you see your students get excited by art and make creative breakthroughs in their work.
Lastly, as an artist, I love being connected to the larger arts community with so many other talented, creative people. I meet many artists, in all disciplines, who are motivating and inspiring, and just interacting with these people makes my life more fulfilling.
Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?
To make a career as an artist takes an incredible amount of determination and a deep commitment to your creative work. It requires long hours spent on perfecting your craft, and the challenge to continually innovate, with no promise of recognition or financial gain. In addition to making your work, you must also put in a lot of time being the administrator of your own business, marketing your work, finding places to exhibit, applying for grants, etc.., For many non-creatives, it is difficult to understand why anyone would choose this path. Unfortunately, in our society, “success” in most careers is often quantified by how much money we make. It doesn’t take into consideration the innate need for an artist to make things, and the profound satisfaction one gets from creating. “Success” for an artist is often measured in different ways. For many artists, just being able create and exhibit their work, despite financial pressures and time restraints, can bring a great sense of accomplishment, which is considered “success”. It is therefore important for non-creatives to support the arts in any way that they can, to ensure that creatives keep creating.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.tracyspadafora.com
- Instagram: @tracyspadafora
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/tracy.spadafora
Image Credits
Mark Wilson Photography