Art with a Twist

An Interview with Perry Ingli

  KNOWN INTERNATIONALLY FOR his landscapes and abstract tornado series, Perry Ingli is one of seven artists who have exhibited all 10 years of Art-A-Whirl.

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.