Tracy grew up in Texas suburbs making art projects under her mother's drafting table, drawing imaginary neighborhoods full of beautiful gates, round windows, and lush gardens, quite different than the scenery around her.   

Tracy earned a Bachelors of Fine Arts  in Fashion Design, studying interior design, and art history, as well as fashion history.   She then worked as a seamstress and milliner specializing in vintage clothes for more than a decade.   This brought her into a world of people who restore historic homes,  fill them  with antiques all of the same era, salvage  historic wallpapers, and have closets filled with antique textiles.

During the 2020 lockdown Tracy delved deeper into painting as a form of meditation.  She would bike through the empty streets of New Orleans to find and paint places that exude beauty, protection, nourishment, and peace.   Places that have survived other plagues and turmoil, where people put on a new roof and plant more rose bushes after each storm.

It turned into a series on ironwork, architecture, gardens, and hope.

When the restrictions were lifted, she remembered the artists selling in the middle of the French Quarter and thought that would be a great way to get back into society, sitting with her art in one of the loveliest streets on earth.    Then everything she made sold, and Tracy was suprised to discover a new career which has growen and blossomed ever since.

There's a feeling we get in places that were designed with great attention to detail, build  by skilled craftsmen, then lived in and watched over by generations of people.  It's a feeling that ranges somewhere between tranquility and delight.  Tracy Popken's art is about those feelings and those places.