Successful British landscape artist who enjoys painting the Fens and the Flow Country
Fred Ingrams was born in 1964. He grew up in rural Berkshire, was educated at a Catholic boy’s boarding school and then headed off to London where he studied both at Camberwell College of Arts and St Martin’s School of Art. He left the former for refusing to use oil paints and was expelled from the latter as a ‘disruptive influence’. For ten years he painted above the Coach & Horses pub in Soho, whilst exhibiting in various central London galleries. He has worked as a graphic designer and art director on many magazines including: Sunday Times, The Field, Tatler, Vogue and House & Garden.
In 1998 Fred moved to Norfolk where he paints and draws both nudes and landscapes from life. When he’s not out painting the Fens or Flow Country, Fred lives and works in a modernist glass and metal roofed pigsty conversion in Norfolk, with his wife Laura and their children.
In the tradition of the great British landscape painters before him, Fred Ingrams paints “en plein air”. Sitting in front of his portable easel he deftly creates small sketches of the view before him. Then, back in his studio, the studies are used as the starting point for a larger finished painting. To this day Fred still refuses to work in oils, preferring acrylic paints for their intensity and clarity of colour and quick drying quality.
“The Fens provide one of the few landscapes where one can be totally alone. When I am out painting the only sounds are distant tractors, the call of lapwings, warblers and the cry of marsh harriers. I find I now need that space and solitude the Fens offer. It is both a physical and spiritual need, to be totally immersed with no distractions. It is for all these reasons I feel so at home painting in this landscape, that has the sense of being at the edge of everything.”
Rise Art Prize: Finalist 2018
