Art Bio for Tracy McCallum
A life-long artist, McCallum hung out with a mysterious artist named Bill Heine on the Lower East Side of New York in the early 60s..and was also inspired by a Jewish Sumi Painter named Doc of Chinatown. Later, he studied art at San Francisco City College and the San Francisco Art Institute, but ended up getting a BA in English Literature so he could earn an income.
After a restless period of travel, he settled in Taos, New Mexico for 40 years where he took up painting again, built two homes, created and showed his landscape work and held down a day job as a librarian for over 25 years. A 6′ x 3′ landscape of his called Evening Star resides permanently in the Art Room of the Taos Public Library.
Upon retiring from the library in 1997, and taking a workshop with renowned calligrapher and ink artist Kazuaki Tanahashi, he returned to his roots in calligraphic form, and got pretty wild with his painting. That resulted in a show, called “Trees” with Marsha Skinner and Willi Wood at the Parks Gallery (now defunct) of Taos.
A decade ago McCallum moved to the Olympic Peninsula and felt an urge to expand into three dimensions, and also a desire to work with natural materials, so he took up turning wood into bowls as his primary art focus. The wood tells him what form and shape the bowls should take, though he has a preference for the Asian forms. Exotic woods from around the world like Cedar of Lebanon, African Zebrawood, Sassafras, Osage Orange and Koa, along with Cucumber Tree and Ambrosia Maple find their way onto his lathe. He has been a member artist of the Harbor Art Gallery since April of 2018 and enjoys the ambiance and fellowship of the Port Angeles art community. He has recently created a new painting studio in his workshop barn and returned to painting along with continuing to seek new and perfect forms in wood.
Most recently he was the featured artist at the Harbor Art Gallery in December, 2019.