Having seen earlier drawings by Ingram at the home of a Santa Fe collector I tracked down his telephone number. I received a warm invitation to visit him at his studio, located at the top of Upper Canyon Road, an area that still preserves something of the funky Bohemian milieu that once characterized this town's early art colonies. This drawing stood alone in his studio and was shockingly different from the work I had just seen. Yet everything was the same. The same model, the same techniques, but larger, taking him from draftsman to sculptor. I felt as if I was viewing one those oversized, life-like masks by the Australian sculptor Ron Mueck. Ingram's face advances on the viewer and diminishes one's own scale, an effect that is almost Lilliputian. After three years of doing self-portraits, Ingram now needed a larger canvas (so to speak) to capture details he was beginning to observe, more caught up in the interstices of his facial landscape than in his overall image. And while I do not want to overstress topographical metaphors, one can see how two features, pores and skin creases, form rising and sinking patterns to delineate the most subtle undulations of the face's contours, much the same as the tracery of line that water creates in desert landscapes.
