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Seattle Pacific University
Spring 2007 | Volume 30, Number 1 | Features

Response Art Work

Pink Emperors

Pink Emperors
2005
Watercolor
30” x 40”

Jill Ingram
SPU Alumna of 1973
www.jillingram.com

Watercolor artist Jill Ingram is part of a farming family in the foothills of the Blue Mountains, in the small town of Dayton, Washington, population 2,715. Her husband and grown children raise wheat and pigs. “I do a lot of pig paintings,” she says. “Pigs are full of color, and I try to find color wherever I can.”

To have an excuse to paint with wild colors, Ingram created a tulip series that includes “Pink Emperors.” Her flower watercolors will be featured in a garden-themed art show in Walla Walla, Washington, this spring. “I love the way watercolor flows on the paper,” she says. “It’s entrancing, entertaining, and therapeutic.”

There are other benefits to being an artist living on a farm. Ingram has her own art studio in the main family home, which she calls the hub of the farm. She has private space to paint in the studio, only five minutes from her downtown Dayton gallery, Jill Ingram Watercolors. In the gallery, which is housed in the historic Weinhard Hotel, paintings are watched over by hotel employees. “When a potential buyer shows interest in one of my paintings,” she says, “the hotel calls me, and I just zip over there from my studio.

“I thought at first that maybe being an artist was a waste of time,” admits Ingram, winner of the 2006 Northwest Watercolor Society show in Seattle. “But God has been gracious to show me it’s a vocation. It’s a way for me to change and know myself better, to surrender myself to him in ways I never would have.”

Painting, says Ingram, is like observing an object as a scientist does, or tasting a recipe as a cook does. “You focus on a subject till you know it. It becomes part of you.”

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Response art
Pink Emperors
Class of 1973 alumna Jill Ingram introduces Response readers to “Pink Emperors.”