The Island Gallery welcomes Tracy Loeffelholz Dunn to its group of talented artists. Originally from Hawaii and descended from Japanese plantation immigrants, Tracy is fourth generation Japanese-American, or Yonsei, and finds her art influenced by Japanese textiles. Tracy uses oils on coarse canvas, often rubbing on and off layers to stain the canvas and incorporating textile imprints. The result is to create a surprisingly warm effect that evokes the spirit of printmaking and the lushness of Japanese textiles. Tracy ’s newest series depicts flowers dressed in kimono. Most recently she has been incorporating these canvases into three-dimensional mahogany pillars, reminiscent of ancient Japanese pillar paintings.

In Tracy’s words:

My art explores my experience growing up half Japanese; my parents were also each half Japanese, and all this has created an acute awareness in me of cultural "halfness." I dress flowers in kimono. I abuse those traditionally pretty and polite icons to show them decidedly personified: through precarious perspective, ill-fitting robes, rough and asymmetrical and unsettled. . . At times my paintings express the displacement and remoteness of not being whole, of being "almost" Japanese. At times they express the longing for wholeness and the discomfort of all this self awareness. And in the end, I hope to show the complexity and uniqueness to be found in being both "not quite Japanese" and "not quite not Japanese," in partial views and partial people.

My pillars take my themes into another dimension. Although I make the painting as a whole, in these works I go a step farther and cut the paintings into four parts to use in a vertical presentation that never allows you to see the whole person again. Each of the new smaller paintings is framed into a mahogany structure built by my husband, but still undeniably part of an overall whole painting.

A former designer and illustrator for The Seattle Times, Tracy has received 41 awards from the Society of Newspaper Design, the Society of Professional Journalists, and PRINT Magazine, including the 2003 award of excellence for Illustration Portfolio. Her series of nine oil paintings depicting stanzas of the William Blake poem "Summer" was published in The Seattle Times. Her paintings have appeared in a number of exhibitions in the Pacific Northwest. Tracy currently lives on Bainbridge Island and works here as Art Director for YES! Magazine.