Paintings of artist Vicki Ingham on display through November

Vicki Ingham paints landscapes, still lifes and (occasionally) figures in oils. For the landscapes, she works from photos she takes on painting trips to Italy, where she does studies on-site in gouache (a water-based paint). She has studied art in Birmingham, Alabama, where she lived and worked for 19 years, and has also participated in painting workshops in Ireland and Italy.

Ingham has a master’s degree in art history from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. After working at Southern Progress Corporation, a magazine and book publishing company, for 14 years, she moved to Des Moines to take a job at Meredith Corporation in 1994. In addition to writing and editing books on decorating, crafts, and flower arranging, she has written Artists of the New South: Women Artists of Birmingham 1890-1950 for the Birmingham Historical Society (2004). In 2009 she began working as a freelance writer and is also working on a biography of an early 20th-century painter-etcher from Alabama.

The Italian landscapes focus primarily on the scenery around Montalcino and Siena in Italy, particularly a region called the Crete. The grayish clay soil erodes into steep-sided ridges that look like they’ve been clawed by a giant hand; where the slopes are cultivated, they make long, rounded slopes that weave into each other. Ingham tries to capture the rolling, muscular hills and clawed ridges in a naturalistic style that celebrates the beauty of sky and land and light. 

There are also some paintings on collage, which represent the archaeology of  memory—the idea of memory as layers of images and associations, with new experiences  being imposed over and coloring or masking older, earlier ones. Ingham uses collected paper of all kinds—railroad and airline tickets, passes to museums and to shows, as well as letters, wine-bottle labels, and other items that represent an experience or a memory to provide the base for the painting.

She says fruits appeal to painters for their shapes and colors—and because edible props provide the opportunity to work from life with something that’s easily accessible but doesn’t add to the clutter in one’s apartment.

Click here to see more of Ingham's work.