_edited.jpg)
ARTTYCO TALKS
A conversation on light, texture, and time, where painting meets photography, and transformation becomes a way of seeing.
ARTTYCO TALKS | October 04, 2025.
EPISODE #14: INGE GECAS
1. With a background in architecture, print design, and photography, how do these disciplines shape your approach to painting, especially in terms of texture, light, and composition?
I:All three, architecture, design, and photography shape how I see and structure an image. Architecture taught me to think about form, balance, and how space is constructed. That still shows up in how I build a composition or decide where weight or tension should be.
Print design gave me a sense of how to shape order and reach for clarity both in the concept and the visual flow. Photography brought in atmosphere, light, and a more dimensional way of seeing. It also taught me to respond quickly to what’s disappearing or about to change, and to look for unexpected angles within my own ideas. Sometimes, that shift completely changes the concept and I follow it.
When I paint over a photograph, I’m often thinking about how texture or gesture can break the image’s surface and shift its meaning sometimes softening it, sometimes interrupting it, but most often allowing it to evolve into something completely different. That moment of unexpected emergence is what I love the most.
2. As someone who works with fleeting forms, how do you curate or select which moments of transformation to preserve in a finished piece.
I: Over time, I’ve learned to trust my instincts. My process is influenced by Zen principles, but I also like to push against them finding unexpected ways to speak about spirituality in simplicity without pretentiousness. I respond to visuals and objects that feel spiritually charged or that reveal something about a particular place or moment. I take many photographs and gather objects leaves, twigs, bits of plants on walks or travels. I often live with these materials for a while before deciding what to develop further. It’s a slow, intuitive process of seeing what still holds resonance.
As part of that process, I spray-paint the objects as they evolve shifting their original meaning and allowing transformation and connection to emerge. I photograph them using natural sunlight, often during the painting process itself. That natural progression from observation to transformation is both my creative method and a form of spiritual practice. For me, it’s the process that carries the meaning and becomes embodied in the final work.
3. What kind of emotional or sensory response do you hope your audience takes away from an encounter with one of your paintings?
I: When applying lines and brushstrokes, I try to avoid stylization or mannerism. Instead, I follow natural movement like the way branches shift in a storm or how sea grass leaves patterns in sand. My art is grounded in abstract concepts, often shaped by emotion and a sense of poetic expression. I’ve always been drawn to philosophy, and what I aim for is a kind of spiritual abstraction an open, intuitive way of expressing ideas that can’t be explained directly.
I believe that art can hold a kind of enlightenment, a form of knowledge about our connection to nature and to each other. I’m especially drawn to the idea of layering, which comes in part from my fascination with polyphonic folk songs where multiple voices overlap, creating an illusion of depth and space. I use that approach visually: overlapping forms or gestures to create a space in between. That in-between space often holds the emotional or sensory tension I’m most interested in.
4. Your work often blends analog techniques with digital processes, natural light, and botanical elements. What draws you to this hybrid approach, and how does it shape the emotional or sensory experience of each piece?
I: For a while, I was focused solely on painting and other traditional methods, but discovering digital photography opened something new for me. I wanted to bring it into my practice not as collage or contrast, but as a seamless, genuine connection between painting and photography, where one flows into the other and creates a unified emotional and sensory experience.
I learn something new with every step I take into the unknown during my practice and often through sharing that process on Instagram. I love trying new techniques and finding unexpected connections that lead to new ideas and directions in the work.
Using natural light is important to me. I don’t alter the light or color digitally, because they carry the emotional tone of the image as it was experienced. I also work with botanical elements branches, dried plants, stones not just for visual interest, but because they hold time. They carry a sense of fragility, change, and memory. They’re remnants of something once living, caught in a moment of transformation.
5. Time and transience seem central to your work. How does the passage of time both in the making of the piece and in what it captures inform your creative decisions?
I: Each moment holds the entirety of experience; time itself is being. When I create, I’m not trying to document a moment that’s passed, I’m meeting it, responding to it. The materials I work with organic, like dry leaves or grass, or non-organic are all fragments of time, already in motion. I try to be present with what they are now, not what they used to be.
I like spraying dry leaves with colors as if preserving or preparing them for another life. That gesture feels like inviting an old beggar into your home and taking care of him. In a way, I’m also interested in pushing boundaries of what’s considered beautiful by bringing attention to forms and details that exist beyond conventional standards forms that carry time, and are often overlooked.
