Object Type: Painting

Medium and Support: oil on canvas

Credit Line: Florence Griswold Museum; Gift of James McNair from the Estate of Sewell Sillman

Accession Number: 2019.33.1

Ingle was born in Indiana and graduated from Princeton University in 1941. During WWII, he acted with USO troupes. He studied art with WPA artist/illustrator Robert Lahr of Indiana, and with Fran Soldini. Ingle taught at Connecticut College for fifteen years beginning in 1957, and lived in Old Lyme. He was the former president of the Essex Art Association and the Mystic Art Association. In 1972, after spending years there as a summer resident, he moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he had found deep inspiration in the living artistic culture of the Native Americans of the Southwest. An artist of eclectic interests that included writing poetry, translating French Symbolist poetry, and composing music, he created work that reflected his interest in establishing a sense of oneness between his medium, his marks, and his forms. The language of his paintings often references timeless symbols such as the cross/monogram at the lower right of So. The combination of layered pigment, patterned areas, and letters in So recall the explorations of the Cubists. In 1964, Ingle said of his intricate approach, “Complexity is the one area in which modern art can continue developing. The levels of meaning, of appearance, of inter- relatedness of concepts, are practically inexhaustible."

Sewell Sillman, who owned this painting, shared Ingle’s commitment to abstraction and intellectual complexity in art, as well as his love of the Southwest. He organized a memorial exhibition of Ingle’s work at Lyman Allyn. Sillman printed a catalogue for the show complete with a screenprint of one of Ingle’s paintings, Time Trap (1967). Ingle’s works have been shown at venues such as the Whitney Biennial (1956) and are held in private and public collections in Connecticut, New Mexico, New York, and Indiana.