Inga Dalrymple
Inga lives and works in Sydney, Australia. Her work employs formal elements—color, line, composition—to capture fleeting impressions and memories of her surroundings and to create layered surfaces. She seeks the ephemeral nuances of a line or color, imperceptible beneath layers of paint that have been erased, scratched, or scraped, in order to generate interesting starting points for new images.
Inga is fascinated by how an image can begin with an idea drawn from memory and end up becoming something entirely unexpected. She always starts by observing the physical world with curiosity, gathering notes—how a shadow falls along a wall, the combination of colors of random objects resting on a dusty shelf—for later reference in the studio. Music, poetry, and unusual words also influence her practice. Anything that evokes a memory or a sensation can become a reason to paint.
Although her subjects mainly come from landscape—both natural and urban—and still life, much of Inga’s work reflects an inner dialogue, a conversation with the materiality of paint: what it can do, how it can be stretched or pushed to convey something surprising, a flourish, a layer, a line, or a color that informs her next move.