Fred Ingrams: Paintings of the Fens
The work of Fred Ingrams really appeals to me, especially his landscapes. They are bold, graphic compositions, alive with colour, but still unmistakably rooted in a real place.
Ingrams studied at Camberwell and St Martin's before spending ten years painting above the Coach & Horses pub in Soho. Alongside his art he built a successful career as a graphic designer and art director, working for publications including Vogue, Tatler and House & Garden. In 1998 he moved to Norfolk, where the strange, expansive landscape of the Fens became a major focus of his work.
I can see why. The Fens are such an unusual part of England, a vast man-made landscape of drained farmland, straight ditches and waterways beneath enormous skies. Ingrams takes those strong horizontal lines and makes them almost abstract, then disrupts them with wonderful, sometimes unexpected colour.
He has painted the same places again and again, something I completely understand. The view may barely change, but the light never stays still. Colours shift, clouds gather and disappear, and suddenly the same stretch of land becomes a completely different picture.
What is lovely is that this wasn't a short-lived fascination. Ingrams says he spent ten years painting the Fens and produced more than 500 paintings. More recently he has also turned his attention to the Flow Country in the far north of Scotland, another huge watery landscape, although he continues to return to the Fens.
Perhaps part of my fascination is how unfamiliar all that openness feels. Living in hilly Cornwall, our landscape can feel as though it wraps itself around you, hemmed in but somehow comforting. In the Fens, everything seems to stretch away into the distance. The hand of man is more obvious too, in those rigid fields, drains and roads disappearing towards the horizon.
There would never be a dull day with a Fred Ingrams painting on the wall. A window onto a landscape that at first appears simple, but changes completely each time you look at it.
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