Visions and Vignettes is an artist memoir and portrait sketchbook featuring 46 pencil portraits paired with short stories from the artist’s memories, imagination, and working-class, immigrant roots. Explore a gallery of dreamers, outsiders, and immigrants—faces that shimmer with joy, sorrow, and quiet resilience.
What do portraits reveal when paired with stories that linger behind the eyes?

In this collection, Tracy Kocsis—an intuitive, self-taught artist—brings together pencil portraits and companion vignettes that explore memory, heritage, and the weight of working-class life. These faces draw us into a world of dreamers, outsiders, and immigrants who dared to step into a strange new land. Some images shimmer with joy and strength, while others carry uncanny indifference, sorrow, or quiet angst.

With the raw immediacy of outsider art and the lyrical cadence of folk storytelling, Visions and Vignettes invites readers into an eclectic gallery of human resilience and longing—threads woven together across generations, forming a fragile but enduring ancestral tapestry.