Tracy de Bernhardt Wood, current PhD candidate

Painter, Iconographer

Media: egg tempera, gold leaf, watercolour, oil, and cold wax encaustic

Tracy's first career was in Special Education needs, including being Principal and CEO of Specialist Residential Provision (school and college) for the Visually Impaired for 17 years. On changing career, she studied portraiture with individual masters and then studied academic classical work full time at the London Atelier of Representational Art in Bristol and London. Subsequently, she studied on the Prince's Foundation, School for Traditional Arts three-year iconography course under the tutelage of Aidan Hart. She began her doctoral research at the School in September 2022. Her research focuses specifically on female faces in pre-14th century icons. For Tracy it was very important to study how to make realistic likenesses of worldly faces before studying how to make Holy and transfigured faces. Icons must point to both elements of our world and elements of the eternal and transcendent. The current part of her journey is about exploring how early prototypes of female saints achieved this, using both tension and harmony, within traditional compositions and constructs. Currently, she is working on using models from earlier icons, with faces which are fairly realistic, combined with more abstraction in garments, and strong abstraction in the backgrounds. The icons shown are examples of this work.