Painting & Printmaking School of Fine Art
Maisie Ingram
Maisie Ingram (b.2003 London) is a figurative painter based in Glasgow.
I use painting and drawing to think about memory and time. Day to day I see too much too quickly. Working with images slowly lets me hold onto what I see, look closely and try to understand. I’m interested in moments where time opens up, slows and widens. Moments where you get stuck staring at something before it slips away. Painting allows me to spend slow time with these moments. I try to make this stopping and sinking into time, into glances that could have been fleeting, the subject of the paintings. I work with my own photos and observational drawings, my family photo archive and imagery from other paintings; I pull from my immediate environment and from the images lodged in my mind. I’m interested in quiet moments of uncertainty, play, secrets, (mis)remembering and (mis)communicating, drawing, the tendency to look for patterns and sense where there are none. My materials choices are guided by an interest in gesture, colour and mark making. I prioritise conveying sensation and emotional realism, the image may be blurry but the feeling is sharp.
Fire Scenes
What makes a painting worth doing? It was winter and I needed to stay warm. We kept making fires. There are skips and jumps that stretch and make less sense as a blink becomes a whole room; but then there’s all the nights spent camping, spent trying to stay warm, looking at your friends, looking to pass the time. And maybe the scene is quick, it’s a half a second, it’s blink and you miss it, but now it’s material, its marks on canvas that are an object in this room, solid and stable. A memory you can hold, a shadow you can touch. The paintings are here so that the time doesn’t slip through my fingers. But it needs to be a little bit tearing at the seams.
