Ian Ingram

Ian Ingram lives and works in Austin, Texas. Ian Ingram’s self-portraits are autobiographical reflections of meaningful events, such as his wedding or the birth of his child; that is, times when a decision or an action changes one’s worldview. Beyond serving as a vehicle to relay his feelings to the outside world, Ingram’s drawings become unflinching windows into his subconscious, and serve as a tool for his own self-reflections and ruminations. His hyper-realistic and intensely emotional self-portraits arrest the viewer with a direct gaze that at times seems almost uncomfortably intimate. Ian Ingram’s tightly rendered canvases are dreamlike, the result of Ingram’s use of a range of techniques. From careful cross-contours, grids and lines to amorphous passages of blended charcoal, each method plays a role in building Ingram’s expression of the human face’s subtleties. Working with charcoal, pastel, ink and watercolor, Ingram also incorporates more unconventional materials such as beads, beeswax, metallic thread, silver leaf, string and even butterfly wings. Ingram’s work is included in numerous private collections, as well as the permanent collection of the De Young Museum in San Francisco, California and the Arnot Art Museum in Elmira, New York. Ingram is a graduate of the University of Georgia.