Pam Ingalls was raised in Spokane, Washington, in a household where both parents — Richard and Marjorie Ingalls — were painters. Her father founded the art department at Gonzaga University, where Pam later earned her BA in Fine Art in 1979. She had already studied at the Accademia Di Belle Arti in Florence from 1977 to 1978. Between formal education and the sustained painting practice she maintains today, she walked 7,000 miles through eleven countries on the Bethlehem Peace Pilgrimage in 1982, painted a portrait series of homeless individuals in Seattle for Catholic Community Services, and worked as a graphic artist through 1992. Then she began painting again in earnest — first studying drawing with Frederick Franck in Warwick, New York, then apprenticing for three years under Ron Lukas, a Russian Impressionist and protégé of Sergei Bongart, in Seattle.
In Looming, a snow-capped volcano dominates the composition's upper half, its pale blue and white peak set against a salmon-pink and deep purple sky that consumes nearly two-thirds of the canvas. Below, a horizontal band of dark purple-black foreground gives way to a reflective body of water rendered in murky greens and browns, dotted with yellow-lit structures and wooden pilings that mirror upward in loosely brushed streaks. The paint application varies dramatically—the sky is worked with soft, blended strokes while the water's surface fractures into more insistent, directional marks that fight against the illusion of reflection. There's an oddly static quality to this drama: despite its chromatic intensity and the volcano's physical dominance, the composition's rigid horizontal divisions and symmetrical arrangement suggest resignation rather than imminent threat. The still life and kitchen subjects in her other work apply the same pressure: each painting is built around the drama of illumination against a resisting darkness, the threshold where a form becomes distinct from the ground behind it.
In 2024 she held a solo exhibition, “In The Russian Tradition,” at the Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis — forty-five oil portraits of refugees from the Heartland Alliance in Chicago that had previously shown on Vashon Island before traveling to the subjects themselves in Chicago. Her work has been juried into more than 125 national and international shows and exhibited across the United States, Europe, and Africa.
I paint simple things — the things I see, am attached to and love. Every subject contains an essence that belongs to just that moment. I get to be with that feeling while I translate it into the poetry of paint.
