ARTIST Profile - Freddie Ingoldby

Whitstable artist uses wooden panels to paint the North Kent Coast

Freddie Ingoldby is a 22-year-old artist from Whitstable who specialises in, well, scraping acrylic paint across discarded wood. And we love it. Freddie, the floor is yours.

“Much of my work is acrylic landscapes of the North Kent Coast - mainly Whitstable - on wooden panels. I complete them using knives to scrape the paint across the boards.

“As for the wooden panels, I mainly get them off people in Whitstable/Kent who have no use for them. For example: old shed walls, skip waste and pieces of wood I find on the beach, so pretty much anything I can get my hands on for free.

“The first artwork I did was on my our family's dismantled tree house. The initial use for me using them was the cost - for an unemployed (except for my commissions/prints) student, canvas is pretty expensive, and these panels are completely free. I also get to recycle and repurpose old discarded bits of Whitstable to produce new images of Whitstable. This keeps the process much more locally based. 

“There are also technical reasonings for wooden panels: as I apply thin acrylic paint layers with a knife, the grain of the wood pulls the paint off the knife and creates a bitty effect - kind of like having noise in a photograph.

“If I was to use canvas the surface is less solid meaning less noise. The random nature of the grain of the wood also makes where the paint grips less uniform than it would be on canvas, enabling my relatively chaotic style of painting. For me it creates an energy in the paintings, as though it is a windy day or something similar.” 

Instagram: @ingoldby_freddie