Ingrid Sanchez

The Mexican-born watercolourist talks to MARTHA ALEXANDER about Instagram, English weather and why she owes the physicality of her paintings to ballet and yoga

- MARTHA ALEXANDER

Ingrid Sanchez’s first studio was a storage room in the backyard of her parents’ home in the Mexican city of Morelia. She was nine years old and would while away hours painting in oils. However, it would be some 20 years before she would have her own workspace again and first use watercolours, the medium that has anchored her career as a professional artist. Ingrid now paints and teaches small classes at her home studio in West London, where she has been based for the last seven years.

It is a forensically tidy, bright white space dominated by plants although she’s in the process of converting the summer house in the garden into another area where she will work, too.

“I am a very organised and clean person,” she says proudly. “My students always say, ‘I thought artists were messy!’ It is very important for me that everything is where it’s supposed to be.”

Ingrid makes original paintings as well as selling her designs to – and working in partnership with – many Ingrid Sanchez leading businesses and brands. Her work can be found on homewares, thermos flasks and greetings cards and she has worked with the likes of Moonpig, Macy’s and Waterstones. Whatever the intended purpose, her bright, purposeful works teem with colour and movement. You’d also be forgiven for calling them “flowers”, yet Ingrid sees them differently: “I paint dots and lines. I do it in a way that makes you think you’re looking at a floral composition, but I don’t paint flowers. They just look like flowers.”