“The Magic Light of Umbria
- Harmonic Drama of Color in Tina Ingraham’s Paintings “
Tina Ingraham feels landscape as a deciding stimulus, and she chooses the hills and the wide sky of Umbria. The artist doesn't create nature for herself but particularly depicts the light. In Umbria, sky and earth are one, identical. It is “an Arcadia” full of beauties... and you can see it in her paintings in “Treffpunkt Kunst”, the gallery of Kunstverein Ottobrunn.
She shows heavenly landscapes with pronounced contours: with clouds, which loom up under a dramatic thunder-storm, with golden colored light in contrast with the gray-white masses; and in the shadow there is the wideness of Umbria. This is opera as a natural phenomenon. Italian art loves it like that, but here it is staged with classical discretion.
The dramatization of color in the works of Tina Ingraham doesn't unleash explosions of light but aims at harmony of color and form. Again and again she allows ruptures, provoking them in a discreet transference to abstraction. You can, for example, find a broad brush-mark in these gentle, shining-from-inside compositions.
The very special breathing management of light, this gentle and sensitive brushwork, the interplay of form and color is done on muslin instead of canvas. It is the mostly dark undercoat from which the artist’s Umbrian dream wondrously unfolds; as if from a veil of mist.
You can trace out a bewitching romanticism of nature or perhaps discover landscape as an illusional image field, as if to say an arrangement of light, shadow, space and plane. But after all it is useless to talk about theories: The “Light of Umbria” in Tina Ingraham’s paintings warms you, seduces you, and drives you manic. It is truly addictive.
Landkreis Munchen Translated from the review April 30, 2005 Manfred Stanka
