Scott Ingram’s current solo show at Emily Amy Gallery, Cusp, continues his twelve-year long series of Nail Polish paintings. Ingram has used the medium to take the aesthetics of mid-century painters such as Ellsworth Kelly and Morris Louis into a humorous pop-cultural context that explores how painting can still be relevant. I spoke with Ingram about the evolution of the series during his installation at the gallery.
Scott Ingram: I’ve never actually stopped making them. I’ve been making them consistently for almost 12 years. They really started out as very formulaic: there were specific paper sizes, papers, textures of the paper; it was very specific. It was all based on Arches watercolor paper; they were specific to the sizes. The only way I could deviate from that was to tear the paper into quarters. There were basically four sizes in the beginning and there was nothing on canvas. If it needed to be bigger it was an assemblage of papers; it was modular. There had to be rules to it, because without rules you could go anywhere, and at the time I wasn’t sure I wanted to go anywhere with it. I really made very rigid and stringent rules because I didn’t want it to rule my life, and once I first saw how it worked I knew it could if I let it.
A couple of years ago, I thought, you know the wall drawings are really great, but that’s not part of the formula. So, I really needed to change and develop new sizes and new ideas for it. For Nancy Solomon’s show at Solomon Projects it was still very rigid with the sizes, but they were all big with the exception of the wall drawing. Then I did the Contemporary’s and Spa Sentio’s wall drawings and was like, “I’ve completely screwed up the formula.” Once I let the cow out of the gate it was done. So now there are no rules.
he funny thing is now there is even more thought that goes into it, and the planning is even greater and longer. I am actually doing color-pencil studies for them now. I don’t want to make the same piece over and over again. Even changing the colors isn’t enough for me. You can have the bright colors and do the same scheme and composition, but even if it’s darker colors, it’s just the same piece in darker colors, which isn’t that exciting to me. The challenge is making a different piece every time. A lot of them are very similar, and that just happens. And part of it is a combination of finding things that I like in them and the experience of making them and wanting that experience to happen again when restarting the whole process.
SD: As you go through the show, the repetition of shape and composition forces you to pay attention to the subtleties of how you adjust each painting. The aesthetic seems to marry minimalism with color theory.
