Pantheon Series (House 1)
A painting from Ingham’s latest series of work. Please visit the gallery to view more. These works are a response to a prolonged interest in creating beautifully mysterious, strange visual stories of uncertain narrative and the way in which paint can create a space and imbed within it the means for a powerful subjective reading.
All pieces are created with oils on panel or canvas. Found and constructed images are used as source material, blurring the importance of authorship in the subjective consumption of uniquely crafted artworks. The images are often architectural, such as American Gothic homes, film sets, theme park architecture, some are based on real film stills, others are fake film stills constructed in the studio by the artist. These images are rendered on canvases pre-prepared with objective marks. The application of the objective sculptural elements, three dimensional layers of poured paint, creates further ambiguity concerning the choices made during the process of painting and planning the work. Different styles of painting language are combined in one piece. Different mark making with areas of thin glazes building up a luminosity with glowing depth of colour, alongside areas of blurred technique, or thick paint.
Space is created in the painting through the subtle manipulation of cool and warm tones and the contradictory effect of texture on the perceived picture plane. These effects are applied to the fundamentally two dimensional source material.
As the images form themselves during the painting process, relationships between the source materials and the objective marks make themselves felt and further decisions can be taken to bring the entity together as a whole.
The major decision in the process is where and when to stop rather than where to begin, in some paintings layers of images from different sources can be glimpsed, some contain incongruous elements collaged together effecting a fantastical scene of impossibilities.
These processes create a discourse on the language of paint, and the place of painting in a media saturated world, where photography has risen as the primary mode of representation. After the rigours of modernism, painting is finding its new place in a more superficial world where surface is everything, and this complicated and unique role is one of the themes being explored in all of the works.
