Ingrid V. Wells

What can we say, we love pink! Naturally, we had to feature the work of Ingrid V Wells! Ingrid and I (Lisa) met in John Obuck’s drawing class at Arizona State University. She had a passion for painting, founded the painting club and is a total bad ass who moved to San Francisco for grad school.

Ingrid V. Wells has been painting for a decade. She earned her BFA from Arizona State University and her MFA from San Francisco Art Institute. Her work fancies the fantastic and humorous in theme and the charming, the kitschy, and the celebrity in subject. Wells’s paintings investigate the world of gendered consumerism and the ethics of fascination. Her work has been featured in The Huffington Post, Daily Mail, BUST Magazine, and Teen Vogue, among others. Wells currently lives and works in San Francisco.

We must learn more about these hues and sparkles; here is what Ingrid has to say about her work:

My oil paintings reflect the feminine spectacle. The over-the-top, sparkling works deliver a feminist message, celebrating the hilarity and ridiculousness of growing up female in America.Pageantry and fanfare often find themselves in my work.

These paintings belong to my new series Spectacle, comprised of 20 paintings that will be complete at the end of 2019. In this new series, the paintings reflect miniature plasticine trinkets from girlhood, painted as shiny still lives and inflated to grand proportions. The images provoke a bizarre, almost suffocating encounter between viewer and the enlarged, gendered objects. These silly still lives are depicted in variations of luscious pinks and reds across the canvas.Working in oil lends a genuine quality to the images, giving way to the rich nature of the swirled frosting and brightly colored plastic objects. Taken individually the trifles are simply cute bunnies, stars, adorable pandas, scrumptious cupcakes, Hello Kitties and shiny bows. Yet clustered into a candied extravaganza, the image’s complexity deepens and the sugary mass of artificial happiness overwhelms.

This line of inquiry speaks to the pressure of maintaining the ideal woman’s voice as charming, precious, and small. Each painting is a loud parade of honeyed, traditional feminine qualities. Together this series aims to provide a place of reflection, asks you to question your rose-colored glasses, and ultimately works to dismantle the patriarchy (in the sweetest way possible).

In addition to creating her own work, she has started a new project for the art community called TWIRL: A Decade of Artist Interviews (http://www.twirlproject.com/). 

T W I R L: A Decade of Artist Interviews was formed to follow the evolution of a group of artists over a decade. With the goal of creating a digital community of artists, this project seeks to be a point of reflection and an archive of interviews that connect artistically minded people.

Selected artists will be interviewed about their artwork and art practice annually for the next 10 years. Interviews and artwork will be published beginning in 2020. The resulting archive will show how these artists persist in making art despite life’s unforeseeable challenges. Twirlproject.com will be a space to share artists’ work blossoming over time. You are invited to submit by June 1st to the project and join in on the discoveries along the way

Find Ingrid online at www.ingridvwells.com and on Instagram @ingridvwells