Ingrid Whitaker

I have created art all my life and have always been interested in more realistic and natural forms and images. While I admire more abstract works, I have never been drawn to create them and have instead worked from nature and from the world I see around me. I like to paint people and to also create from the natural world.

Having lived in other countries, I also enjoy painting the landscapes and cityscapes of wherever I find myself. While my husband was working in Europe, I was living with him there in a small apartment. To keep busy, I found myself painting the scenes of the everyday life that I saw around me.

Thus, “The Far Distant Alps” a large painting, is the view from a little town in Switzerland where across a large lake the majestic Alps sometimes showed their face. (More often than not, the view was swathed in fog or mist). This painting shows that glorious moment when the mountains started to reveal themselves.

People are also endlessly fascinating to me and I try to capture their expressions in paint. My other works show my need to delineate faces in paint so as to reveal the underlying emotion of each person.

I prefer to use oil paint on smooth surfaces for the flexibility of the paint and its long manipulation time. Thus, my work tends to be detailed and complex.