Artful Journies: "Artists show infinite connection with world"
Exhibit: Tina Ingraham, Dimitri Cavander and Eva St. John
Randall Tuttle Fine Arts Gallery, Woodbury, CT
….If St. John is water-inspired, Tina Ingraham is clearly moved by land. Their work meshes splendidly as opposite ends of the same artistic coin. Where St. John is mellifluous and lyrical, Ingraham is gauzy and vegetal. Ingraham’s small still lifes of pitchers and salt shakers, salmon steaks and milk cartons, are painted on muslin, which gives them a textured, gauzy effect. It is as if all of her still lifes are seen in that strange hour between dream and waking where dreams are real enough to touch and reality is vague enough to doubt.
The earthiness of Ingraham’s work does not disguise its more subtle aspects. These are not merely apricots on a table with a salt shaker, but orbs of faintly human form. The spheres of a peach are spheres of the contours of a body, though whose body is uncertain. Compositionally, Ingraham’s pastel-like works are spare and deft. Her paintings are about humility, the openness to possibility and reverence for nature. Nowhere is this as evident as in “Bread and Knife”, where the simplicity of a loaf of freshly baked bread is deceptive. Here we see the tanned physique of a boxer, there, the large backside of an overweight man, there the fleshy avoirdupois of some generic being. The fact that the dull wood handle of the knife and not its steel, sharp edge lends the feeling of warm excess and earthiness to the painting. The bread is corporeal and looks fresh and warm enough to eat.
Republican American September 1997 Tracey O’Shaughnessy
