Vicious Penguin

The Vicious Penguin Files

A series of interviews with Tracy168 the Artist on the life that informed his art.

“November 9th, 2023:

Late 2020 into 2021 Tracy168 and I embarked on an artistic collaboration. He wanted to tell the historical journey of his art (ripe with its crazy escapades) but where art was key. He emphasized that “it could go everywhere, do lots of things”, true to his life. It had a central character that started it all for him as a child. Tracy had managed to get close to double digits in age when he met him. But this character gave him a code on how to survive the remainder of his life. Together, Tracy and I imagined what he should look like on paper, in some kind of hybrid graphic novel.

We had private calls so I could understand first the nature of this literal beast, and then our recorded video interviews that he wanted for you, the viewer.  And so: these edited videos of Tracy that I made focus specifically on what informed his art. Add them to the mosaic of the few other interviews of his, and still you won’t have the full wild magic. His thoughts are a fast train to chase. To honor Tracy, I’m posting these interviews, and sharing them on what he considered when alive his “official” website that I maintained for the last part of his life. The site was silent, but it marked his turf: his name.

Some background to the interviews: I asked Tracy if he would like to call me by my visual artist name. Instead, he preferred my child-friendly alias. It brought a smile to his face and I think it brought out the child in him, a child he introduces you to in these origin stories: what made Tracy the Artist.

We were still in the height of COVID lockdowns, and like many others, video calls were a means to connect, as well as work. Sometimes video calls worked, sometimes we had to pair them with phone calls for audio. Sometimes one of us just had audio, and the other video. We scraped along with circumstance and found a way.

Tracy was a social animal; animated, humorous and in tune with “the big picture” of what he felt he was doing, which first meant surviving, and then leaving his art (a proclamation of existence) everywhere he could. The trains are a perfect metaphor for this: something fast, something everywhere, and something always moving. That last one, I feel, is most important: because it is in stillness where Vicious Penguin lurks.

Tracy was a writer of art—his letters literally made art—I’m a writer of words—the art of my words happens invisibly, in minds. I’m not a historian of style-writing. I steered him towards accomplished biographers to animate his life on a level that his art animated New York. As has been said: Tracy did what Tracy wanted, not what people advised of him. And so it began for us.”

–Stephanie Nina Pitsirilos