About Artist and Teacher Karen Lynn Ingalls

About Karen as an Artist

Karen Lynn Ingalls creates colorist landscape paintings of rural California, and lives in Napa Valley, in the little town of Calistoga. 
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Karen Lynn Ingalls in her Backstreet Studio, 2013 • Photo by Cornelius Collins

After losing her previous studio in the 2017 Northern California wildfires, her primary studio now is at Backstreet Gallery and Studios, in the SOFA Arts District in Santa Rosa, California, where you can visit her on the First Friday of every month from 5-8 PM.
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Article in the Salinas Californian • by Dave Nordstrand • September 2, 2000

Originally a painter and drawer of people, she began painting endangered landscapes — places threatened by development — as she worked with others to save a threatened wetlands area in Monterey County, where she lived at the time.

​Mesmerized by the land, its colors, and its spirit, she continues to paint rural California.
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Karen Lynn Ingalls painting "Sunset Meadow"

She also draws, paints abstract and mixed media acrylic paintings, and creates block prints, using methods that she enjoys sharing with others in her classes and workshops. And she still enjoys sketching and drawing people, too, whenever she's able to squeeze in the time.
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Two sketchbook drawings — Man with a Beard and Portrait of Renee • graphite • © Karen Lynn Ingalls

Her artwork, including paintings, drawings, collages, and life–sized painted sculptures, have been exhibited, and can be found in collections, on both west and east coasts of the United States, and a few places in between.
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Karen Lynn Ingalls, with four of her seven life-sized painted sculptures. You can see Downtown Charlie Brown at the main Sonoma County Library, in downtown Santa Rosa, California. And you can see Let Love Bloom, on the right, outside the Visitor's Center in Yountville, California.

Her art and articles about it have appeared in local, regional, and national publications. She's also been interviewed for radio and television; and even had one of her paintings appear on a billboard. 
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About Karen as a Teacher

Karen is credentialed as a teacher in California, in both Art and English, and began teaching high school English in Monterey County, where she also met wonderful communities of artists.
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Karen Lynn Ingalls demonstrates painting upside down for the students of St. Apollinaris School in Napa, California • photo © Sandra Cassayre Moore

Since then, she has taught art classes, lessons, and workshops, and given demonstrations to adults and children in Napa Valley, Sonoma County, and other parts of Northern California.
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Karen Lynn Ingalls teaching an Abstract Landscape Painting workshop at the Calistoga Art Center, in its former Masonic Building location, 2010

She taught for Napa Valley College Community Education, and gave art classes and workshops for adults and mature teens through the Calistoga Art Center, as well as private, group, and corporate art workshops. Currently her classes and workshops are all online, and she looks forward to being able to teach workshops in person at the art center again, when health and circumstances permit!
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Karen Lynn Ingalls, in a photograph taken for the Calistoga Chamber of Commerce, and used by them and Arts Council Napa Valley to promote local art and artmaking to Napa Valley visitors.

Karen's students frequently describe her as enthusiastic, inspiring, encouraging, and nonjudgmental. 

Her specialty is teaching both the inner game of art – how to tap into your creativity and tame your inner critic – and the skills, tools, and techniques that help her students make better paintings, and develop their own styles. 
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Painting demonstration for Artists' Round Table of Sonoma County, fall of 2013 — demonstrating the benefits of painting upside down

She believes that making art in the spirit of experimentation and discovery is good for both the soul and the art. 
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And she's developed a special, step-by-step question-and-answer process that helps her students discover just what it is that their paintings need next, especially when they feel stuck, so they can fix what isn't working, and create artwork that they love.

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Karen Lynn Ingalls's teaching philosophy
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The process of painting "Sunset Symphony" — an early stage • © Karen Lynn Ingalls

Painting is, at its best, a dialogue between the painter and the canvas. 

At the beginning, the painter has lots to say...
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The process of painting "Sunset Symphony" — a later stage • © Karen Lynn Ingalls

...but as the painting progresses, the painter needs to stop, step back, look, and listen, more and more, to learn what it is the painting wants.

It's not about where you start — it's about where you take it — and where it takes you. 
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The process of painting "Sunset Symphony" — at a later stage • © Karen Lynn Ingalls

​I teach my students how to look and listen more closely – and how to dive in to the heart of the creative process.

That means trusting the process, too. When you trust the process, no matter what, and you listen to the painting, magic happens.
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"Sing" • mixed media painting in an early stage of the process • © Karen Lynn Ingalls

"Sing" • mixed media painting, final stage of the process • © Karen Lynn Ingalls

​It's also about knowing who you are as a painter, too — where you're coming from, what the work means to you, and how to approach it in the way that works best for you.

It's not a one-size-fits-all kind of thing. It's definitely not about copying what someone else does — it's about bringing out the visual voice that is yours, that no one else in the world could express in the same way as you.
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Erik creating an abstract landscape painting.

Jane creating a mixed media piece with acrylics and collage.

In my classes and workshops, we don't do critiques. 

I teach and demonstrate methods, techniques, and things to look for; we look at the examples of other painters; and we practice and try things out in a spirit of experimentation. 

Then we talk about what the work in front of us needs, just two of us at a time. You get the knowledge you need to make better paintings; I ask you questions that will help you discover how to best make that happen.
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Karen at a young age, painting on the patio, with her father and brother practicing hammer skills in the background.

Every four-year-old is an artist. All too often, somewhere in the process of growing up, people in our culture stop making art. Something happens — a chance remark? an adult's criticism? — and the child decides that she or he must not be an artist, after all.
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Learning to create means dipping back into the joys of creation that every four-year-old knows. But creativity isn't only joy. Sometimes it asks of us perseverance and patience, close observation, and the willingness to suspend judgement.
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Sketch after Norman Rockwell's "The Critic" • sketch © 2015 Karen Lynn Ingalls

That last bit — the willingness — no, the need — to suspend judgement — comes harder when we're grown. Our inner critical voice pops up and tells us that we must be nuts to be painting, that the artwork before us looks like hell, and what were we thinking, anyway?
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Learning to suspend criticism and judgement can be tough. But it's absolutely essential in order for creativity to flourish.

That's an important part of how I teach, and why I teach the way I do.
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Karen Lynn Ingalls painting Knights Valley Autumn.