Emerging Artists | Ingrid Christensen

Ingrid Christensen, Fallen, oil, 30 x 40.

Ingrid Christensen, Fallen, oil, 30 x 40.

This story was featured in the January 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art January 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

Ingrid Christensen has noticed a funny trend at her home in Calgary, Alberta. Some of her kitchen utensils, it seems, have migrated to her painting studio. “It’s a one-way street—they never come back,” jokes the Canadian artist. Of course, how they got there isn’t a mystery to Christensen. Spatulas and mixing spoons, as it turns out, create beautiful mark-making effects in her impressionistic still-life and figure paintings. She has even used tools from an auto body shop—“anything that scrapes or inscribes in the paint,” she notes.

Paintbrushes are always her primary tools, but Christensen also frequently reaches for a palette knife to build up oil paint on her surfaces. Her fascination with her medium’s sculptural qualities stems, in part, from her previous work in pottery and metalsmithing. “Oil paint is quite naturally a three-dimensional pigment,” explains the artist. “It’s like playing with colored frosting all day. You can layer it to get complicated color and textural interactions. It’s beautifully abstract.”

Primarily self-taught—and today a painting teacher herself—Christensen has taken workshops with artists like Ignat Ignatov and Alex Kanevsky. She also credits the act of painting still lifes from life with informing her painterly, partially abstracted style. “If we’re out in the world, only one or two percent of our view is focused on an edge,” she explains. “Everything else is a soft view. When you work from life, you’re reminded this is how we see the world. And then it’s not so hard to paint a looser, more soft-edged world.”

Find Christensen’s work at LePrince Fine Art, Charleston, SC; Roux and Cyr International Fine Art Gallery, Portland, ME; Tutt Street Gallery, Kelowna, BC, Canada; Oceanside Art Gallery, Qualicum Beach, BC, Canada; and Rendezvous Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC, Canada.

This story was featured in the January 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art January 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

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