Cuiscene

“Let them see cake.” Tina Ingraham’s painterly landscapes of gourmet tableaux are portraits of delicious synaesthesia.

Feast Feast

Your Your Eyes Eyes

Most people, after baking a luscious yellow cake with raspberry filling and vanilla icing, would simply devour it. Tina Ingraham bakes her cake to watch it age and then records its decomposition on canvas.

“As the cake dried, it shrank and the icing pulled away…It developed crevices in the interior and all around the layers with the filling. It was wonderful,” says the artist, in her lofty, airy studio in downtown Bath.

Ingraham loves to paint all sorts of food, usually with oils and in abstract settings. If art can be food, sustaining and inspiring us, food can also be art, where both nourish and reflect each other in ways she finds fascinating.

“I love grocery shopping for my paintings,” she says. “I glory in the beautiful colors. Walking through a farmers’ market is like walking through a rainbow. I look for special groups” of vegetables or fruits. “I find great joy in this.”

Ingraham’s paintings are all about raw ingredients, closely and intensely observed–bunches of radishes or carrots or beets, for instance, newly

harvested and with the greens still attached.

Lining her studio walls are some of the fruits of her labors, including Bunched Radishes, Beets in Rubber Band, New Garlic, and Radishes in Twist Tie. What’s striking about her veggie images is how much they resemble her paintings of people, such as Dune Bathers I, Mirage, and Dune Bathers III. The subjects sprawl on a sandy beach, legs and arms overlapping in a way that invokes root vegetables assembled at table, the string bikinis resembling twist ties or rubber bands.

“It’s not something I sought,” Ingraham says, referring to how the shapes echo each other. “It just happened.”

She remembers a day in 1997 when, driving through Cumberland, she was struck by some beautiful pears hanging on a tree. With the owners’ permission, she clipped a pear with attached twig and some leaves from the branch, and then painted it. Soon she did the same with apples and mandarin oranges, putting them “in nameless settings, on a table surface surrounded by air, or maybe with a wall behind it. I found that doing this brought out questions of memory, identity, spirit. It became metaphorical. It would suggest states of being, time passing, even the human form.”

The twigs and leaves fairly exclaim their date of harvest by their decay “and what has grown with them. They give information about their home and their life,” she says. Grocery stores usually remove this foliage, “but at the farmers’ market, you see roots, leaves, stems, twigs–which offer wonderful opportunities for angles in the composition. And with the twigs, I think of fluids moving through the tree veins, the passage of time, life forces.”

“I watch the radishes slowly wilt and soften,” she continues. “They become like fingers wrapping around each other. It’s all revolving–a cyclical, ever-changing process that feels intimate. The produce assumes a character of its own outside my will. It transpires.”

Throughout her life, Ingraham, now 63, has worked as a fashion designer making bridal gowns, an advertising artist for department stores, and an art instructor in several academic settings. But painting and drawing–with oils, pastels, or watercolors–is her first and abiding love. She handcrafts the surfaces on which she works, gluing muslin or linen to a panel and then painting on it, sometimes with pigments she grinds and mixes herself.

Born in Ohio, she came to Maine in 1969 to go canoeing on Lake Sysladobsis and stayed with her husband at an old hunting lodge in Grand Lake Stream. They loved it so much they returned year after year. “Once we came for ice-out,” she recalls. At first the lake was frozen over, but then it began to melt. “The ice turned black, and as it broke up it made little tinkling sounds, like bells. There was a big wind storm. It was wonderful.”

Gradually, she realized that Maine was where she wanted to live. She moved to Lewiston, then North Yarmouth, Falmouth, and Cumberland–with side trips to Brooklyn, New York (where she got an MFA), and Italy (on a Guggenheim Fellowship). In 2003, she moved to Bath, lured by the availability of an attractive, well-located studio on Centre Street. It sits between the Bath Natural Market and a popular hangout called Cafe Creme. And, tellingly, it’s “a three-minute walk to the farmers’ market,” she says. n

Green arsenicsmeared on an egg-white cloth, Crushed strawberries! come, let us feast our eyes.

–From lustra, by ezra pound, 1916

Ingraham’s studio is occasionally open to the public during Bath’s Art Walks, and her paintings are on display at Greenhut Galleries, 146 Middle Street, Portland. Visit tinaingraham.com or greenhutgalleries.com.

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