©Eric Inkala.
You’ll know an Eric Inkala painting when you see it. Self-taught, with a background in graffiti, the Minneapolis-born, Brooklyn-based artist’s work is bold, brash, and attention-grabbing.
Inkala began painting while a student at Perpich Arts High School in Golden Valley, Minnesota. After spending a gap year traveling with friends who were in bands, he enrolled at the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC, now CCA) in Oakland, where he studied until education costs became too expensive. Relocations to San Francisco and Minneapolis followed, until he landed in New York, where he’s lived since 2009.
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“I always wanted to be here,” he says of the move to the East coast. “I was bored artistically in Minneapolis. I felt like I got to the point where I couldn’t do much more and I wasn’t feeling super inspired.”
From “Chaos Complex,” shown at Public Functionary. © Eric Inkala
His style has transformed over the last two years as he moves away from his distinctive black outlines and signature character—a monstrous-looking creation with big teeth and bulging eyeballs that appears in variations throughout his body of work. “I was getting bored with the recurring character stuff. I’m going to keep pushing it and making it even weirder,” he says.
This evolution is an organic one, however, not a symptom of “selling out” or trying to appeal to a particular market. While his use of iconography and the subtext of his paintings are often intentional, the drive to create the kind of art he does is subconscious, like his latest desire to experiment more with shadows and abstract shapes.
One thing that hasn’t changed in Inkala’s work are the striking colors. They’re not chosen so much because of aesthetic, but out of necessity. “Everyone doesn’t believe me,” he says, “but I’m colorblind.” The medical term is Deuteranopia, or red-green colorblindness. It affects approximately six percent of the male population. “Green is a hard color for me to use,” Inkala says. “When I see it, my brain shuts down.”
From “Chaos Complex,” shown at Public Functionary. © Eric Inkala
The condition hasn’t hindered his creativity, however. He simply “overcompensates” with more audacious hues. Working in a shared studio and using acrylic and cel-vinyl (“the polymer in the paint is different, so it dries super matte,” he says), Inkala has ten different paintings in progress at any given time.
“Eric’s art is meticulous, and I appreciate his dedication to developing his art. He is disciplined and determined,” says Tricia Khutoretsky, director and curator at Public Functionary, a Minneapolis gallery where Inkala exhibited last November. “While I am drawn to the bright colors and unique compositional choices in Eric’s work, I think what makes his work worth experiencing is the purely imaginative, joyful and deliberate energy that radiates from it.”
Since showing in more prominent galleries, Inkala’s sales, commissions, and commercial work have been on the rise lately. The Public Functionary exhibit, which featured Eric’s more recent works, was particularly lucrative.
From “Chaos Complex,” shown at Public Functionary. ©Eric Inkala
“Eric’s exhibit was a huge success, of course because we sold a significant amount of work, but also because what he accomplished with the new body of work was groundbreaking for him as an artist,” says Khutoretsky. “His new direction attracts new buyers and audiences because he has broadened the language he is communicating with. I think his previous works will still continue to be popular, and even preferred by some buyers. But this new direction is forward movement and progression, every artist needs that.”
“That was a pretty big deal for me,” Inkala concurs of the Public Functionary exhibit. “I sold a lot of work at that show, a lot of larger paintings. It paid off. It was awesome to have success in that regard.”
While he also has several murals under his belt, it isn’t his preferred form of artistic expression. “A lot of times, when you do that kind of work, the person hiring you doesn’t have a lot artistic sensibilities, which is really hard,” he says. “They’ll tell you exactly what they want and you’ll draw exactly what they told you they wanted, and then they’ll see it and want to change it a hundred times.”
From “Chaos Complex,” shown at Public Functionary. ©Eric Inkala
In the past, Inkala might have “sucked it up” because the money was good. While he still bartends three nights a week to supplement his income, he’s at a point now where he can pick and choose what projects to work on. When asked if his dream is to make art full-time, Inkala laughs and replies, “Isn’t that every artist’s dream?”
