Jan Inglis new ideas in paintings.
The Corrie-based painter, Jan Inglis, is well known for her seascapes that show wind and water in every mood and every quirk of their changing light and colour, but the pictures she showed this month in Corrie Hall mark a step into some bold new thinking. All the arts depend for their real strength on the element of surprise that comes from working so hard that the subconscious becomes involved in it as well, producing unbidden scraps of dream and impulse that have a powerful effect. Having the courage to accept these unexpected elements and go with them marks the difference between the true professional and the amateur. If creative expression is a vital part of the artist’s life, it will not stay contentedly in a corner, to be taken out from time to time as a pleasant relaxation. It is a force to be accepted and reckoned with, no matter how inconvenient to its owner or how shocking to others.
Jan’s exhibition demonstrated exactly this act of faith, stepping into wider and more demanding territory as she used new techniques in a direct response to an essentially passionate view of life. The first hint of this came in her Swirling Sky (shown in photo), in which she had allowed ‘thrown’ paint to find its own detailed, infinitely fine ways to express the movement of cloud. Overall, the use of vigorous impasto and a close tonal range increasingly suggested movement and activity, as in her A Green Sea in Summer, but the most recent paintings brought this into stronger expression. A Light Shower (pictured) used broad sweeps of brushwork and a scumble of half-transparent white to suggest a steamed-up window and blustering rain from a sky that was about to lighten. The most fully developed of these new pictures, though, was After Rain. In a complete break from the artist’s usual technique, this used hard-edged indigo and white in a pattern evocative of sun-dazzle on dark water, broken by a scatter of residual drops, as transient as something seen in a half glance. To give lasting expression to a moment barely recognised is very central to the purpose of art, and Jan’s new paintings have real power.
