Pracko grew up near a Navajo reservation in Farmington, N.M., where he was exposed to the Natives’ rich legacy of textiles, jewelry making and pottery. With a chemistry major from the University of Colorado, he did some textile conservation and traded Native wares. Despite his immersion in the applied arts of southwestern desert artisans, Pracko left creative endeavors and directed his energies in the high-charged world of business – financial consulting, deal structuring, commercial real estate and public company mergers and acquisitions.
Both how Pracko receives his inspiration and his very act of painting are physical. He lays his large unstretched canvases on the floor in the tradition of the Abstract Expressionists. on his knees, Pracko uses his hands, window washer squeegees, stipple brushes and paint floggers – floppy brushes for flinging paint. on one canvas – Life – he twisted the canvas up, poured paint inside it, swung it overhead and threw it on the floor. When he unwound the canvas, the paint had traveled to key spots within the composition.
Incredibly, Pracko is color-blind. His solution is to paint colors he sees – purples, blues, yellows, black and red appear often in his work. one obvious inspiration for Pracko is the work of the Color-Field painters – Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Mark Rothko, Paul Jenkins and Sam Francis. Pracko saturates his canvases with layer after layer of acrylic paint, creating an atmospheric quality like gaseous, light-filled nebulae and black holes of deep space.
Kandinsky warned that artwork divorced from spirituality is merely decorative. "In each artistic circle are thousands of such artists, of whom the majority seek only for some new technical manner, and who produce millions of works of art without enthusiasm, with cold hearts and souls asleep," Kandinsky says. Clearly, Pracko is in the minority, and he seeks a higher end for himself – to produce artworks that resonate with spiritual truth.