After ten years of painting the Fens and over 500 paintings later I have started to paint another landscape. Not exclusively, as I will always paint the Fens but my main focus will be in the far north of Scotland.
The Flow Country is roughly 1500 square miles of blanket bog that straddles Sutherland and Caithness in the far north east of Scotland. It is roughly the same size as the Fens and is also a landscape created by peat and water. The similarities however end there. Unlike the Fens it is almost untouched by man and has slowly evolved over the last 10,000 years since the last ice age. Of course people have lived there in small pockets on the edges of this wilderness for centuries but most where driven out in the late eighteenth century highland clearances. Today almost all of the Flow Country is uninhabited which given that the population of England and Scotland is over 60 million makes it very special. It is special in another way as it is also the largest blanket bog in Europe and our largest carbon capture. It is estimated the Flow Country holds 400 million tonnes of carbon. All the woodland and forestry in the UK only holds 150 million tonnes. As we become more aware of global warming we have also become more aware of just how precious peatlands are both for helping with climate change and for their unique wildlife, plants and mosses.
It was not these facts and new found importance that brought me to want to paint here. I was first introduced to this extraordinary landscape by an old friend, Simon Upton who apart from being a successful interiors photographer is also a passionate stalker and falconer who has been going to Caithness all his life as his father has before him. I was immediately awestruck by the beauty and vastness of the landscape and knew at once that I wanted to paint here. This landscape is intimidating in its grandeur and isolation and visually so totally different to the Fens. There were no straight lines, no roads, no ditches, no telegraph poles - no vanishing points! It has taken many visits to finally pluck up the courage to try and capture this land in paint. I have always loved the east coast of Scotland as my grandmother was from Aberdeenshire and I have spent many summer holidays there not far from the village where Joan Eardly lived and painted. The east coast of Scotland unlike the west coast is relatively flat and this is particularly true of Caithness. Once you pass Scarabens, Morven and Maiden Pap the land is totally flat, watery and forgotten. As a result after years of painting in the Fens I feel totally at home when I paint here.
It is a landscape of stags and eagles. It is a wild place that you feel is timeless and at times truly sublime. I have heard so many people describe the country they live in as God’s country. What they look at though is a country that has been created by man. The Flow Country is the one place I know that can truly claim to be God’s country.
A short film about my work by Gavin Kingcome
THE FENS are against nature. I doubt if that's how I put it to myself at the age of twelve when the black sails of what might have been a Thames barge loomed above a road near Downham Market and shut out the day. It was terryfying. The presence of water higher than land prompts a sensation that is akin to vertigo. The primary purpose of a canal so straight that it disappears over the distant horizon is of course to drain the thousands of acres south and east of the Wash, thousands of acres which are below sea level. The secondary, unintended, purpose is to frighten, to make hydrophobics of us all.
Denver Sluice is provokes awe and horror. It is also addictive. How can we be sure that the banks will hold? In my nightmares they don't. How can we be sure that it is safe to drive across the Ouse washes? The relentlessness is discomfiting: every road looks the same. How can we distinguish the 100 foot drain from the 30 foot drain which might as well be the 50 foot drain. Landscape and waterscape fuse into a unique unforgiving entity that stretches as far as the eye can see: scary, gaunt, austere. This is a geometric open-air factory of meteorological mercilessness.
The Dutch prettify their polders and sweeten their dikes. They make colossal efforts to mitigate the ubiquitous harshness. With rare exceptions no such niceties are affected in the fens. To soften them would be to deny their quiddity, would dissemble their provisional essence, would disguise the inevitability of the sea’s reclaiming the land whose the horizontal bias apes the sea's. No area of Britain will be more susceptible to the catastrophes that climate change will visit on us.
The sinewy landscape of black earth, the tough metallic watercsape of drains that suck their colour from the sky, the butch pumping stations and uncompromising silos are, whatever their appearance may tell us, fragile, threatened. They exist on borrowed time. Nature - the new nature of the anthropocene - is going to have its revenge as sure as if it were a Sicilian.
Fred Ingrams shares his subject's relentlessness. He paints it to the exclusion of all else. The repetition is fetishistic ritual. So no doubt is the practice of painting plein air when, given how long he has been doing it, he must have the rectilinear maze fixed in his memory. The necessity is psychological rather than practical. He nags at the land and the water in a one way exchange, squeezing out of them new colours, making them yield fresh forms, rendering himself suggestive to this meld of elements which is in constant mutation - if you keep your eyes open: the clouds and the immense sky, the murmurations, the purl of water caught by a gust, the shadow of a pike in the reeds, the distant rain moving like a ghost ship.
Drains, delphs, dikes, sluices, catchwaters, gutters, leams: the industrial words attached to the fens are apt in their bereavment of prettiness. Ingrams's work is a brusque visual analogy of them. He does not confuse the picturesque with prettiness. He offers no relief from a unforgiving repertoire of mudscape and opaque water which is not, however, minimalist. His work does not represent. It is not about the place where he puts down his folding chair and his easel. It is rather about the ideas which that place foments. Some of those are ideas concern colour, though this unclassifiable artist would probably not wish to have such an etiquette as 'colourist' attached to him. Nor would he answer to 'abstractionist' even though he takes prairies and watercourses which are extraordinary in their formal orthogonal cartography - as though Mondrian was working for the OS - and exaggerates them further to the point where the connection between canvas and 'subject' is dissolved. This is the very opposite of a photograph and it makes the point of plein air practice comprehensible. His affection for the fens is such that he divests them of menace. Familiarity has not bred contempt. He normalises them. In some of the more verisimilar works there are even rivers with bends in them like the Nadder or the Cuckmere, apparent invaders from a more recognisable England of pasture, hedges, sheep and kine.
Ingrams's fens are devoid of those and, more notably, of human figures though generations throughout the past four hundred years are omnipresent in every drain and drove. It is not fanciful to see in Ingrams's insistent remaking of the same places a meditative monologue with the shades of the Earl of Bedford, Cornelius Vermuyden and the Company of Adventurers, who created the fens for him, a gift he has repaid handsomely, votively.
Jonathan Meades, 2019
Portrait by Julian Anderson
Fred Ingrams was born in 1964. He studied at Camberwell and later expelled from St. Martins School of Art.
For ten years he painted above the Coach & Horses pub in Soho, whilst exhibiting in various central London galleries.
He has worked as a graphic designer and art director on many magazines including: Sunday Times, The Field, Tatler, Vogue and House & Garden. In 1998 he moved to Norfolk where he divides his time painting in Norfolk and The Flow Country.
Selected Exhibitions
July 1987 Group show – Christopher Hull Gallery, Motcomb St. London
August 1987 Group show – Birch & Conran Gallery, Dean St. London
Sept 1987 Group show – Diorama Gallery, Regents Park, London
January 1988 One man show – The Groucho Club, Dean St. London
June 1988 Group show – Richmond Gallery, Cork St. London
July 1988 One man show – The Albermarle Gallery, London
August 1989 Group show – Richmond Gallery, Cork St, London
July 1989 Group show – Takeaway Gallery, Portobello Rd, London
July 1991 One man show – Rebecca Hossack Gallery, Windmill St, London
April 1992 One man show – Bruton Street Gallery, London
May 1993 One man show – Bruton Street Gallery, London
April 1996 One man show – Park Walk Gallery, London
October 2009 Group show – Hampshire Art Fair
May 2010 Group show – Art in the Park, Norfolk
March 2011 Inspirations 2011 – Group show, Norwich
June 2011 Group show – Group Eight, 18|21 Gallery, Norwich, Norfolk
May 2015 One man show - VANISHING LINES - Art Bermondsey, London
Feb 2016 One man show - FLAT EARTH - Lynne Strover Gallery, Cambridge
Dec 2016 One man show - DITCH - Art Bermondsey Project Space, London
April 2017 One man show - NEW PAINTINGS - Lynne Strover Gallery, Cambridge
Feb 2018 One man show - NEW PAINTINGS - On Paved Court Gallery, Richmond, London
October 2018 One man show - A YEAR IN THE FENS - Lynne Strover at Stapleford Granary, Cambridge
June 2019 One man show - EDGE OF LANDSCAPE - Nick Holmes Fine Art, Iris Studios, London
Dec 2019 Residency - Snape Maltings, Suffolk
Oct 2020 Group show - TALES FROM THE COLONY CLUB - Dellasposa Gallery, London
Feature in Vogue, June 2015
