Echoes in the Canopy Painting

Carla Tracy is a British visual artist and designer whose work draws on the quiet intensity of natural forms, dreamlike symbolism, and the emotional resonance of colour. Rooted in her background in fine art, fashion design and career as a graphic designer, her paintings are a delicate fusion of abstraction and structure—where textured brushwork and stylised bold shapes and subtle textures translate what’s seen, and what’s felt. Her paintings are emotional terrains: spiritual stills inspired by nature’s quiet grandeur and the symbolic power of transformation. The work explores themes of stillness, femininity, and elemental beauty. Waterfalls, moons, stylised flora, and geological textures emerge in pastel tones and atmospheric hues, with every colour choice speaking to a place, a moment, or a feeling captured in time. Carla’s creative practice is intimately tied to her photography, career as a graphic designer and love of travel. She gathers more than just visual moments as she moves through the world—she collects sensory fragments of experience: the rustle of sunlit leaves casting shadows on timeworn walls, the quiet pull of a distant, unreachable mountain, a solitary dog tracing its own path at dawn, people immersed in the landscapes around them, or sharing silent, wordless exchanges with animals. These moments linger—not just for what they look like, but for how they feel. In Carla’s studio these impressions become the seeds of her paintings, not reproduced literally but reimagined as layered compositions of colour, shape, and texture. In her studio, the world is transformed: distilled into abstracted fragments that speak to memory, stillness, and the emotional trace and sensation a moment leaves behind. “I’m always chasing the feeling a place leaves behind, Not just the view, but the mood, the texture, the light—even the smell, sound, feel or taste. It’s everything happening all at once in a single, fleeting moment.” “Coming from a graphic design background, I found it hard to let go of the precision—the structure, the clean lines, the controlled nature of every minute detail. But I missed the spontaneous freedom I’d known in my fine art beginnings—the mess, the movement, the unpredictability of paint. Eventually, I realised I didn’t have to choose between them, so I let them collide.