Bryan Ingham

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Bryan Ingham (1936-1997) was a British artist born in Yorkshire who specialised in painting, etching and sculpture.

Early life

Bryan Ingham was born and raised in Yorkshire’s Calder Valley, in one of its many terraced houses, and the surrounding moorlands, a landscape that marked his later artistic language deeply. His father George was a sales rep for mens clothing, and his mother Alice took in sewing from time to time when the family finances required. He was unsuccessful academically at school, but had a warm family life, and his Uncle Leslie Ingham, who lived for much of the time in the household gave him an early exposure to and love of literature and music and as a result Ingham became as an adult very well read, with a particular zest for and knowledge of poetry.

On leaving school he worked for a time in a department store and acquired an affection for the business’s standards and the people whom he met that never left him. He was an enthusiastic cricketer and had a trial for Yorkshire; it was one of his regrets that having been born in a hospital two or three miles into Lancashire he was disqualified from playing for the county but as he was not selected this remained purely a sentiment.

For his National Service he joined the RAF, and spent his time in Germany as an airman employed in a number of what he regarded as tedious tasks before ending up in charge of the stores at RAF Celle under a laissez-faire sergeant, where he became an enthusiastic operator of the ways and means act. On demob, his final report said “Ingham is an artistic sort of airman.” In his spare time he started painting in oils, and by the time he left the RAF he had completed a large portfolio.

Career

On his return from Germany, he announced to his bemused parents that he intended to become a painter and his father’s delight on thinking that he intended to be a painter and decorator was short-lived. Despite their misgivings, they supported Ingham staunchly through his early and later career, and his father’s allowance paid Ingham’s rent right through his college career.

Training and teaching

He went up to London's St Martin’s School of Art, where he was fortunate to have the tuition of a fine post-war generation of teachers who helped him to hone his draughtsmanship and other skills, and he swiftly showed a capacity for painting that drew the attention of his tutors and peers. On graduating he was offered and accepted a post-graduate place at the Royal College of Art, where in his second year he was awarded a Royal Scholarship and was a contemporary of a number of now better-known names including David Hockney. He was establishing a reputation for bolshiness with his teachers, and in later years he admitted, a degree of arrogance. It did not stop his talent being appreciated by the staff including his director Carel Weight.

It was at the RSA that he made his first acquaintance with etching. Ingham was to become one of the most notable etchers of the second half of the 20th century, remarkable for the size and quality of his plates, which he often attacked in a style he called “quarrying.” He was by then established himself in a fine studio in Fournier St, off Brick Lane and teaching part of the time at Maidstone College of Art, enjoying among others the company of Quentin Crisp, who was a life model there at the time, particularly on the train journeys up and down, during which Crisp entertained outrageously.

Travels in Italy

Ingham had been fascinated by Italy since his youth, undeterred by an early and disastrous visit with Leslie, who during the trip started the descent into madness that ultimately led to his suicide. Ingham applied for and received a Leverhulme travel award to explore the sites of the great Renaissance painters, and spent many happy months engaged in this expedition, and as a parenthesis turned up at the English Art school in Rome, where he lived well and busied himself the same studio that Barbara Hepworth had used.

ettling in Cornwall

At this stage of his career, Ingham consciously rejected the prospect of pursuing a career as an establishment artist, although the RA was open to him, and he went to live in remote cottage on the west side of Predannack Airfield on The Lizard, a location yards from the cliffs and devoid of electricity and running water. It was to be his home for most of his remaining lifetime.

The subsequent years were varied and highly productive, and during them Ingham’s personal artistic voice emerged in the form of a dialogue with influences both of landscape and other artists of every age. His preoccupation with etching resulted in several hundreds of plates and the results are as unmistakable as they are varied.

Ingham was great raconteur and had a facility for friendship surprising for one who led what was prima facie a reclusive life. He had many love affairs in his life, two of which were long-term relationships and additionally was married for a brief period in the early 90’s to Aysel Osäkin a writer and poet of Turkish nationality, who figures in a number of his etchings of the period. The earlier of these relationships, with Stella Benjamin, who remained a close friend until his death, brought him over to St Ives for some years where he had a studio in Back Road West, while retaining his Lizard retreat, and indeed for a time his Fournier St studio.

uccess in Germany

In the late 80s a chance meeting on the Lizard coast path with some German visitors resulted in an invitation to spend time on a bursary on the north German coast at Worpswede, where he felt very much at home and to which he returned regularly thereafter. His work was much admired in Germany and he was always sure of regular and lucrative informal shows there. The Kunsthalle held an exhibition of his work.

Later life

During this time he established a relationship with Francis Graham-Dixon, the art dealer, who at that time had a London gallery. The relationship meant that his paintings were properly and professionally marketed for the first time, and prices for his work increased steadily in the last ten years of his life. He purchased a cottage in Helston for his parents, who lived there until their deaths. His friendship with Josephine Gooden resulted in his conversion of a barn adjoining her Lizard farmhouse and he lived there in more comfort than in his cottage which he nonetheless always retained. He moved from there into a fine set of barn-type studios with a fine patch of garden quietly situated off the High St in Helston, and it was here that he died, having stoicly endured cancer for nearly a year.

His paintings are in many public and private collections in the UK, Germany and elsewhere.

During this time he recorded a lengthy memoir in the course of a number of conversations.

ources

* [http://www.scribd.com/doc/4830896/Bryan-Ingham Bryan Inghams own words in his Memoir]
*Guardian newspaper Obituary.