Artist Julianne Ingles provides a contemporary link with the painterly tradition in the visual arts. This tradition is a lineage of artists who share a quality of loose flowing brushwork, a love of paint textures and richly impastoed surfaces. Such artists have long been a part of the Western tradition. First practitioners would be such notable Renaissance artists as Gruenwald and Titian and the tradition runs into the 20th and 21st centuries with Modernists such as Matisse, Modigliani, Braque, de Stahl and Marini. This style is distinguished by brushwork with the feeling of the hand of the artist behind the brush, with prominent and well-defined strokes, usually arranged in small repeating patterns. It is brushwork that resonates with an almost organic quality; like blades of grass in a field or minute pebbles in a riverbed. These artists are frequently distinguished by sensibilities in which one finds a sense of personal warmth toward the chosen subject matter. This can be seen in Rembrandt's compassionate humanism, Monet's affection for the effects of color and light in landscapes, or de Stahl's abstract but powerfully sensual canvases.In Ms. Ingles' work we find strong links to the painterly tradition. Perhaps most important for her development were her studies with the well-known French artist Madeleine Stanley Jossem at the Art Institute of Chicago. Jossem's oil paintings feature rich painterly surfaces with subject matter relating to architectural elements and themes of war and suffering. Ms. Ingles states, "Madeleine was a strict teacher and knew painting inside and out. She was steeped in the traditions of Impressionist and Cubist painting and I was fortunate to have this knowledge passed on to me." The other artist whom Ms. Ingles studied with at the Art Institute of Chicago was Karl Wirsum. His imagistic style of painting had a partial hand in forming her approach to archetypes as figures in her work. Another influence is the altruistic philosophy of Gandhi. Ms. Ingles states, "His ideas about making a positive difference in the world and facilitating change are ones I wrestle with often in my career as a painter. Is it possible to achieve these goals through painting?"
Ms. Ingles body of work can be observed in three distinct categories: florals and still lifes, mythic figurative work, and landscapes and architecture. Often the genres are combined and in many works we see figures in landscapes with architectural structures. All are painted in a distinct palette featuring many subdued grays. Ms. Ingles expresses, "What would a painting of mine be without gray, that vastly misunderstood color?" Other prominent colors are off whites, blacks, ochres and earth tones, usually complimented by touches of rich colors like brick red, turquoise or shale blue. There is careful attention to modulations of color so that despite the limited palette there are subtle, luminous color harmonies, suggestive of contrasting sunlight and shadow.
Ms. Ingles' work sometimes makes use of decorative patterns, as might be seen in wallpaper or ornamental ironwork, which she uses to make a counterpoint with monochrome sections of her paintings. This creates the illusion of space as one might see a lace curtain before an open window or iron railing on a balcony in front of an open sky. It contributes to a distinct sense of place, which is one of the cardinal aspects of Ms. Ingles' work. There is the feeling of being in rooms opening up through windows or balconies to larger spaces. It is a curiously airy, non-industrial space, suggestive of stucco homes in the southwestern United States, coastal Italy, the Greek islands or even the Spanish plains. It is the pictorial space of an artist explorer who sees the world in a hierarchy of new horizons, each offering a field of insights beyond the last.
Ms. Ingles spent eight years in the southwestern United States and has traveled in Mexico and many European countries. Her affection for Mayan and Aztec ruins finds a place in her imagery. She explains, "I've found that traveling is one of the greatest catalysts for creating a body of work. My trip to Mexico resulted in the painting Quetzalcoatl. The work was inspired by a visit to the ruins of the pyramid of Quetzalcoatl, just outside of Mexico City. This mythic god is often portrayed as a feathered serpent. The serpent represents what binds us to the earth and the feathers are the vehicle to free oneself. My painting is not intended to represent the god Quetzalcoatl, but rather to embody the essence of the myth."
Ms. Ingles also spent several years teaching painting and drawing to children and adults. The testimony of her students often makes reference to her warmth of spirit and inspirational caring quality as a teacher. This aspect finds its way into her artwork. We often see figures in pairs, with one seeming to hover in a protective manner. Enforcing this is the fact that the motifs most often found in her landscape paintings are roofs and windows, both architectural structures that protect from the elements. Going further we see that her floral imagery, most often flowers set in vases in rooms, also has a compassionate element. Flowers in vases are often a token of affection and a symbol of a lyrical connection between human beings and their environment. Though the metaphors are subtly stated, this spirit of compassion hovers just beneath the surface in most of Ms. Ingles' paintings.
One notable example of this is the large diptych painting, Waiting, in which there are two figures. One figure is recumbent on an olive green bedlike structure and seems to represent a person dying of illness. It is attended on the left by a sympathetic figure with a wing-like appendage and two heads that appear to nod up and down. Ms. Ingles describes how the piece came about:
"Waiting came to me in the form of a dead dragonfly in a spider's web. At the time I didn't understand the metaphor. But I studied it and drew it on the canvas, then mixed huge piles of paint: warm gray, ivory, black, and green and loosely put them on the canvas. The standing figure on the left emerged from the drips and the right wing of the dragonfly became the encased mummy-like figure lying down. Eventually I understood. The figure was standing at a bedside, checking for signs of life, looking back and forth at a dying lover."
These figures are broadly delineated in rich impasto that has further been textured by pressing various objects into the wet paint. The recumbent figure is surrounded by deep grays and black, a shadowed environment, while the figure on the left seems to emerge out of sunlight. There is perhaps an echo here of the archetype of the angel visiting the Virgin Mary on her deathbed.
To all the above qualities we can add that of monumentality to Ms. Ingles' paintings. Her mythic figurative paintings are often quite large. The figures are meant to have a grandeur which is appropriate to their archetypal nature. Frequently the structure of her paintings is based on cells of quasi-geometrical shapes that are fitted together like mosaic work or stained glass. Thus they have the appearance of what one might see on the walls in Pompeian buildings, friezes in Greek temples or stained glass windows of medieval cathedrals. This echoing of antique architectural elements adds to the mythic properties of the imagery.
An example of this is in Ms. Ingles' painting Wicked Witch of the West, which is a humorous reversal on her angelic imagery. She states, "It was inspired by the book, 'Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West' by Gregory Macguire. In the book the witch is portrayed as an intelligent, politically active and widely misunderstood social outcast. She became my hero and I tried to put some of her qualities on the canvas." The witch is all the more imposing for her vast size, 108 inches tall. The monumentality gives potency to the characterization by virtue of its epic stature but as it is a curiously humorous figure, the large size suggests a touch of irony. This is compounded by the fact that this tall, thin witch figure is suggestive of a Madonna or saint on a stained glass window or a massive cathedral. This resonance with Christian iconography adds a touch of sophisticated wit to the image. The figure is implied to be 'witch and saint', scary but ultimately good.
The worlds in Ms. Ingles' paintings belong to her figures, which symbolize some of the deeper aspects of our nature, ranging from benevolent to tragic. Ms. Ingles' work is that of a compassionate person with a deep interest in using forms, color and paint textures to conjure metaphors about life and a sense of atmospheric places. These places are part domestic and friendly, part distant and otherworldly. They have a distinct sunlit aura but this luminosity is sometimes troubled by shadows and darkness. There are dichotomies: between light and dark, between figures and other figures, between figures and the places they inhabit. But through these dichotomies Ms. Ingles' work asks us thoughtful questions. What is our relationship with our fellow humans? What is our relationship with ourselves? What is our relationship with the landscape we live in? What gives beauty or a haunting aspect to a place? What is the nature of the world we live in?
Ms. Ingles has lived in San Miguel de Allende, Oaxaca, Mexico City and Prague, Czech Republic. Presently she lives and works in the U.S. She has exhibited widely and her paintings are in many private collections.
Robert Kameczura is an arts writer and critic for Big Shoulders Magazine, Chicago Artists' News and Red Magazine in Chicago.
