Fred Ingrams
Fred Ingrams is a landscape painter based in Norfolk, best known for his paintings of the Fens, the Norfolk coast and the Flow Country of Caithness and Sutherland. Born in 1964, he grew up in rural Berkshire and studied at Camberwell and St Martin's School of Art in London. For ten years he painted in a studio above the Coach & Horses pub in Soho while exhibiting in central London galleries, and he worked as a graphic designer and art director on magazines including the Sunday Times, The Field, Tatler, Vogue and House & Garden.
He moved to Norfolk in 1998 and found his subject in the Fenland countryside, which he has painted ever since: more than 500 paintings of its drains, droves, ditches and black soil. In the tradition of British landscape painting he works en plein air, making small paintings in front of the subject at a portable easel that become the starting points for larger works in the studio. He works in acrylic, never oil, for the intensity and clarity of its colour and its quick drying, and paints this flat, man-made landscape in vivid colour, its straight lines drawing the eye across to a low horizon.
In more recent years he has turned also to the Flow Country, some 1,500 square miles of blanket bog in the far north-east of Scotland: the largest blanket bog in Europe, almost untouched by people, and as roadless and curving as the Fens are straight. He was introduced to it by his old friend, the photographer Simon Upton. Both landscapes are made of peat and water, and both are fragile and vulnerable to climate change. He has also painted the eroding north-east Norfolk coast, from Happisburgh and Sea Palling to Overstrand.
His book Flat Earth: Paintings of the Fens gathers more than 100 of his Fenland paintings, with a foreword by Susan Owens. His work has been shown at One Paved Court in Richmond, Art Bermondsey Project Space and Nick Holmes Fine Art in London, the Lynne Strover Gallery and Stapleford Granary near Cambridge, and in Fen & Flow at Clare Hall, Cambridge, in 2025.
Artist Statement
The Fens are perhaps the least loved landscape in Britain. For some reason the flatness of this huge area of Eastern England does not capture the heart. It is a landscape that does not fit into the ideal of a rolling "green and pleasant land". They are, on the other hand as flat as a billiard table and to most people, featureless and grim. It is an industrial landscape reclaimed from the sea by Vermuyden and Bedford filled with rows of regimented crops growing in the black soil. The wind blows from the east and is cold and nagging. The people who live there appear, like the wind, cold and unfriendly. It is for all these reasons I feel so at home painting in the Fens.
Most of Britain's rural landscape has been forged over time by farmers and is a totally unnatural manufactured facade. This is even more true in the Fens. Almost every inch has been fought for and is still being drained today via hundreds of miles of ditches, drains and rivers that crisscross the land. The constant draining and erosion caused by the wind and the soil oxidizing means the land is sinking and will one day be surely reclaimed once again by the sea. It is a landscape that feels fragile and brittle that hovers between over-draining and flooding, in between the sky and the sea.
As I sit and paint here, I am always struck by how few people inhabit this place. I am nearly always alone. The only sounds are distant tractors, the calls of lapwings, warblers and the cry of Marsh Harriers. It seems that people's fear of flatness keeps the Fens empty. Flatness also changes everything when you look into the distance. Distances become hard to judge and perspective seems altered from the normal, making it like no other place in Britain. It is this flatness that protects the Fens and makes it one of the best kept secrets of our landscape. It is a place full of strange stories, myths, strange place names and strange people. It is a landscape that is on the outside of a world that exists beyond the horizon.
