An Interview with Perry Ingli
How
did you become a painter?
In Aspen, in 1967, I was introduced to plein air drawing. John Powers, principal of the Aspen Design
Festival, had created a lifestyle environment with the Aspen School of
Contemporary Art, where students were brought into contact with now-blue-chip
artists like Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and Robert Rauschenberg.
I couldn’t get into MCAD [Minneapolis College of Art and Design],
because I didn’t have the money, but my drawing instructor at the University of
Wisconsin at River Falls was Larry Rosing, a graduate of MCAD.
Larry is also where the Asian influence comes into my art – he was one
of the first American artists to go into China under Nixon in 1971.
I received my BS in Fine Art at River Falls in 1974. As part of their program, I studied abroad in
London and Vienna. In London, I began
working with printmakers, greats like Michael Rothenstein and David Hockney.
I had studied filmmaking, but found that it was out of my socioeconomic
class. Printmaking appealed to me – it is
affordable and accessible to regular people.
I bought into that.
I studied woodcuts with Rothenstein.
You know, after a while, you come to a point that you admit who you
are. You can try to become something,
but after a point, you realize that you are already a wealth of permutations
that can be expressed. I was a farm kid
from Wisconsin, and I was used to wood.
It made sense to me.
How
has being queer affected your art?
My work is more related to Modernism than to Stonewall. There are thousands of gay artists. You can meet them and not even know it.
The tornadoes probably relate most to my gay consciousness. They are a subliminal thing – when HIV
arrived on the scene is when I started doing tornadoes.
So,
the tornadoes are your reaction to the AIDS crisis?
No, but the terror of the tornado is similar to the terror of the early
AIDS epidemic.
Realize that your peer group [20s and 30s] is the first group where
there are all of these creative people still alive. My colleagues who were creative are
dead. Several generations of creative died.
A tornado does not equal HIV. A
tornado is the violence of nature, the power and unpredictability of nature.
My work is not about the obvious message – it is about what happens
before the stop sign and after. It looks
like something, but people always get their own message from my work. This is a conscious effort on my part.
I do not fill in the blanks. The
audience has to fill in the blanks. That
is why my work is so successful, because the audience is allowed to see their
message in my work.
However,
your later tornado series seems to be influenced by stress in your life, such
as the art-market crash in the late 1990s.
Tornadoes give you the ability to display stress or action, conflict or
the sublime – the terrible beauty of the sublime. It’s really my first mature image.
It helps me to see landscape art not as the English painter John
Constable does – not as a pictorial place – but as a scientific view where you
can depict aspects of the landscape. The
direct relationship is not pictorial. It
is psychological.
Is that where the energy
from your images and your landscapes comes from?
One of the things that artists say about my
landscapes is that my work is not plein air.
They are psychological representations, like gestalt. But even this is off. My work is really informed by my passion.
My painting is a sort of Zen practice. What is represented is the process of
targeting for an image, not a specific target.
It’s not really an abstract expressionism, either, but rather, that
point where psychology meets Zen.
I’ve learned how to position the medium and
myself in regards to the world, and how to unify this experience, or rather how
to record an experience of the moment.
My artwork is more of a documentation of a
perspective in time – not the perspective itself, but a product of time and the
process of creating.
Where can we see your work?
My studio at 759 Pierce St. NE. is open
during the entire Art-A-Whirl festival.
My artist reception, featuring solo jazz guitarist David Roos, is May
21, 4-7 PM. Also, every Thursday, 5-9
PM, and by appointment.
My work is on public display at various
locations, including the River Gallery and Discovery Gallery at the New Science
Museum of Minnesota in St Paul, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Wells
Fargo, the Gateway Center at the University of Minnesota, and the Minnesota
State Historical Society (including its GLBT collection).
originally appeared as "Art with a Twist: An Interview with Perry Ingli," Lavender Magazine, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 13-26, 2005, p 32.
