Rising From the Ashes: Karen Lynn Ingalls on Art, Resilience and Creativity

Welcome to Painterly Life, where each guest is a new muse! In this powerful episode, host Shannon Grissom sits down with celebrated artist and teacher Karen Lynn Ingalls—whose incredible journey through illness, inner criticism, and the devastating Tubbs Fire has shaped a life devoted to art, healing, and purpose.

Karen shares how she:

Lost her studio and decades of artwork in the Tubbs Fire but found renewal through creating paintings from ashes

-Overcame Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and reclaimed her creative voice through collage and mixed media
-Tamed her inner critic with unique, playful techniques she now teaches to students around the world
-Participated in a successful environmental art activism campaign to protect Elkhorn Slough, using landscape painting to inspire change
-Created uplifting public art installations that spread messages of compassion, unity, and hope.

Whether you're a professional artist, creative seeker, or someone navigating personal challenges, Karen’s story is a moving testament to the transformative power of creativity.

TOPICS COVERED

-Art and trauma recovery
-Rebuilding after natural disaster
-The power of community-driven public art
-How to silence your inner critic
-Art as activism and healing
-Teaching creativity online

Tune in for wisdom, inspiration, and tangible tools to help you reconnect with your creativity, even during life’s toughest moments.

Chapters

• 0:00 Igniting Creativity and Inspiration
• 0:49 Karen Lynn Ingalls: A Journey Through Art and Adversity
• 8:10 Overcoming the Inner Critic
• 16:02 Health Challenges and the Healing Power of Art
• 19:57 Rising from the Ashes: The Tubbs Fire Experience
• 27:53 The Power of Art in Community and Healing
• 34:55 Public Art Projects: Spreading Love and Kindness

Transcript

Shannon Grissom (00:05)
Hi, I'm Shannon Grissom. Are you looking to ignite your creativity? Or how about be inspired by a steady stream of muses? Welcome to Painterly Life, the podcast that celebrates those who create, inspire, and innovate. So whether you're looking to spark your next big idea, reignite your passion, or simply soak in some creative energy,

This is the place for you. Painterly life, where every guest is a new muse, just for you.

Well, hi there. Welcome to the Painterly Life podcast. I'm your host, Shannon Grissom. Today we have a vibrant, phenomenal artist, Karen Lynn Ingalls. Karen's work has been exhibited coast to coast from the Lincoln Center in New York City to the Charles Schultz Museum. She's been everywhere. Her journey through illness.

inner criticism and the loss of her studio in a wildfire has shaped her belief in creativity as a force for healing and resiliency. Now she's based in Santa Rosa, California, and she continues to create, teach, help others reconnect with their creative voice, especially during times of challenging moments. Welcome, Karen.

Karen Lynn Ingalls (01:46)
Thank you very much. I do have one thing to add. My studio, my studios, I actually have two studios are in Santa Rosa, but I still live in Calistoga. did, I do, I didn't lose my home in the wildfire. ⁓ I lost my studio. So I still have my home.

Shannon Grissom (02:10)
Now did you lose all of your art? mean everything, the whole...

Karen Lynn Ingalls (02:15)
everything going back to college except what by a miracle I had not returned after a show to the studio, what turned out to be the day of the fire. I had this little weird miraculous intervention and I thought, ⁓ I'll do it tomorrow. And of course tomorrow I think of those as my miracle paintings.

Shannon Grissom (02:42)
Yes, yes. Well, I'm excited to get into all that. Thank you. Let's let's start. mean, really, I mean, your journey is just phenomenal. Let's start at the beginning when you were just a wee child. What was your life like growing up? What was your create?

Karen Lynn Ingalls (02:59)
Well, I started drawing. This is a little odd. I drew an anatomically correct person when I was 18 months old. I think I had looked at something and was just fascinated, went home, drew it small in ballpoint pen. My mother wrote

Karen was 18 months old. ⁓ So my parents ⁓ got me a little card you know, card table and folding chairs that I could sit and draw it child size on a shelf in my closet. I had an endless supply of paper. And as I grew a little older, my dad made an easel for me and

So I just, mostly I drew all the time and I drew people. That's what I just love to draw. So I got lots of encouragement and support. So.

Shannon Grissom (04:05)
It sounds like it. Now, I know you've done a lot of people portraits, but you have this major shift to landscapes. Can you tell me how that occurred?

Karen Lynn Ingalls (04:18)
Well, that was ⁓ in the 1998, actually. I was living in Monterey County. yeah. So it's been a while now. ⁓ I was living in Monterey County. I'd gone there for a teaching job. And ⁓ an artist friend got a bunch of us together and proposed that we paint to protect a sensitive wetlands area that was threatened by development.

It's called Elkhorn Slough. the health of the entire Monterey Bay depends on the slough. And if they had completed this development of 200 homes and nine holes of golf on the northern end of the slough, all those pesticides would have gone into the slough where there are so many animals. It's like a nursery area for a lot of the animals.

and lots of birds. So we did that. We were basically the PR wing of a group that was mobilized. And it was amazing because it got a lot of attention. ⁓ My friend was very good at contacting papers and proposing stories, and they came out and covered it.

And people started looking at it differently. Because before that, it was like, oh, the Monterey Peninsula. Oh, it's so gorgeous. What, the area by the slough? That's where we put the power plant and the landfill and all the stuff nobody wants to look at. So it drew attention to beauty that was there. And it worked, ultimately.

was like Mother Nature was rooting for us. And the day we wound up having a show at the county courthouse, the opening was a couple of days before the board of supervisors was going to vote on this project. Three of them came to our opening. And the week before, the Audubon Society had

their conference in Sacramento, drove out in buses to the slough, saw it, drove back and voted to declare it a national treasure. All of these things came together and for the first time in that they could remember the vote, the board voted unanimously to have a moratorium of several years. And then when it came up again,

Shannon Grissom (06:54)
So.

Karen Lynn Ingalls (07:12)
No dice. It was not approved. And in the meantime, the slough is now internationally recognized as a place for birders and bird lovers to go and see birds on the Pacific Flyway, among other things.

Shannon Grissom (07:33)
What a powerful story and it really illustrates the power of art.

Karen Lynn Ingalls (07:39)
Yes, and that's what I learned from it because before that, you know, I just love doing what I did. And when other people were touched by it, that, you know, I love that. But to see what we painted, what we did make a difference in people's minds and how they perceived, you know, what was beautiful, how they understood the land. It was...

It just was so moving that we were able to do that with our art.

Shannon Grissom (08:19)
Well, you've been able to do so much with your art through several challenges. I mean, you've had three main challenges over the years. You had the Tubbs fire. You had challenges with your inner critic and an illness. Let's start with your inner critic because I battle with that one a lot.

Karen Lynn Ingalls (08:46)
So we all do, right? We all do. Yeah.

Shannon Grissom (08:49)
So how have you dealt with your inner critic? How do you work with that?

Karen Lynn Ingalls (08:56)
Well, it goes back to when I was in junior college. And I was very fortunate when I graduated. I was one of five students who were chosen by the faculty and given a scholarship. We didn't even know about this. They got scholarship money and they decided to divide it between five of us. So we were recognized.

And I was doing good work. I got my work into a juried show, big regional juried show. One other student got something in. otherwise it was like our teachers were in this and all these professionals. And then end of the show, you know, I go get my painting. It's like, okay, now what do I do? How do you make a living as an artist, right?

So I got a job, but I kept working on, you I kept drawing, I kept taking classes, but my inner critic started popping up and I would hear this little voice, you know, it's like, ⁓ well, that's not so good. What'd you do there? know? And then it got more and more insistent to the point where I wouldn't even make a mark.

You know, and I'd hear this, ⁓ yeah, right. You think you're going to be any good at that? I mean, was. But it didn't matter. That voice was there. And it got to the point where I couldn't work. I couldn't do anything. And I was, you know, I couldn't do my drawing. I had a job. I would show up for my job. I would do that. And then I would go home and cry.

You know, I just would cry every night. I, um, this went on for about a year. And then one day I was watching the Phil Donahue show. Remember Phil Donahue? Had to be of a certain age, right? And he had a psychologist on who was talking about mental depression. And I'm listening and thinking, oh, that's what's going on. I'm depressed.

And that gave me a handle on it and I started slowly crawling back out of it. And I realized I did not want to ever go back there again. And so if I would hear that voice, it's like, no, no, get out of here.

You're not helping me. And over time, I came across little methods that people would use and that I could use to just stop it, to divert it. ⁓ So ⁓ it's been very effective for me and for my students.

because we all deal with that. And I've seen one time I was teaching the grandchildren of folks who had been coming out to Napa Valley for a few years, and I would teach them when they would visit every year. And the last year they were there, they had their grandkids. And the youngest one looked at what she was drawing, which was wonderful, and compared it to her older sisters.

Shannon Grissom (12:39)
⁓

Karen Lynn Ingalls (12:40)
And she started crying. so I was sitting there and saying, honey, look, she's been practicing for three more years than you. That's not fair. This is really good. You're really good. You're an artist. But, you know, that happens to so many people. And we need that affirmation to know. Yeah, don't compare yourself. Don't listen to that dark critic. Anyway.

haha

Shannon Grissom (13:10)
So what are your favorite tools for ⁓ firing your inner critic?

Karen Lynn Ingalls (13:15)
Well,

one fun one is to give it a job. So it's fun to hear what my students come up with in terms of a job. One young artist that I began mentoring when she was about seven, when she hit that age where she started getting critical. And you know, she's telling me, oh, you know, I said, OK.

I want you to give your critic a job." And so she thought about it a minute, you know, it has to go do that. Can't come back till it's done. So she thinks about it and then she starts drawing again. A few minutes later, she says, it's back.

Shannon Grissom (14:05)


Karen Lynn Ingalls (14:09)
So I said, well, what did you tell it to do? And she said, well, I told it to go to Cal Mart to get chocolate. Now they lived, this was where my studio was, on a ranch six miles out of town. And I said, well, but it doesn't have the car, so that means it has to walk all the way. And it can't come back unless it has the chocolate. And so she...

went back to work and that took care of it.

Shannon Grissom (14:42)
⁓

I love that!

Karen Lynn Ingalls (14:45)
Yeah. So whatever job you come up with, you maybe it's you have to go to Hawaii and spend some time on a beach for me. And of course, then it has to go to the airport. It has to, you know, do the whole thing. you can't come back yet. You haven't even gotten to the airplane.

Shannon Grissom (15:08)
Almost like Oz, know, man behind the curtain, know? Yes! All these impossible jobs. I love that.

Karen Lynn Ingalls (15:17)
One of my young students, I was giving private lessons during COVID to her and her father, and she was wearing a top that had watermelon designs on it and colors. And she said, I am sending mine to search all over the world for the most scrumptious piece of watermelon in the entire world.

That's great. Kids come up with the most imaginative things. A lot of my adult students will say, you know, it's, I'm going to have it dust everything in the house. It's doing cleaning today. They're all good.

Shannon Grissom (16:02)
Now you have on your website, do you have a download for tips and tools for people?

Karen Lynn Ingalls (16:08)
I

have an e-book that I wrote called, yeah, Nine Ways to Tap into Your Creativity and Tame Your Inner Critic. And I have to set it up so that, because right now it's not just to download, but people can contact me and ask, and I'll be glad to send it to them.

Shannon Grissom (16:29)
that's awesome. I'll put that in the show notes so that they know how to reach you. That's great. Now, you've had other challenges. I know you had major health issues for a while there. And so can you, do you mind speaking about that and how you overcame that?

Karen Lynn Ingalls (16:46)
Well, ⁓ I went down to Monterey County for a teaching job. I'm credentialed to teach English and art. There were no art jobs at the time, so I was actually teaching English. And ⁓ there was an unrecognized viral epidemic in the Salinas Valley where I was teaching. we didn't know what it was. We just thought it was this weird flu that wiped you out.

Well, I got diagnosed ultimately with chronic fatigue syndrome. And ⁓ after I'd been sick for about six weeks, I thought, OK, I'm just going to take a few days off, get my grades in for the quarter, take a few days off, get over this darn thing. And I never went back. I was mostly bedridden for the next nine years. And it was a slow process of getting

you know, getting back. And it was just, you know, not something I would recommend. But it ⁓ slowly brought me back to making art that I didn't have time for when I was teaching English. So it started by I didn't have enough energy to draw or paint, but I could cut up magazine photos.

And I had an entire collection of National Geographic that became part of collages. So I had my scissors, had glue stick, I just did them 8x10s on Bristol paper and ⁓ I would do as much as I could and then I would go lie down again. And every one of those was a prayer for healing. And slowly over time, you know, it...

I began with the help of all kinds of therapies, including traditional Chinese medicine and Reiki and ⁓ amazing, amazing ⁓ doctors and medical professionals that I eventually got to the point where I could function. Wow. Yeah.

Shannon Grissom (19:11)
Wow. Reiki is so powerful. I had one session where I felt just like this huge dump through my body. And I heard in my mind's ear, Elvis has left the building. ⁓

Karen Lynn Ingalls (19:16)
⁓

Shannon Grissom (19:31)
And I was in the middle of the reiki session. I start cracking up. I can't stop laughing. She goes, what just happened there? I said, Elvis. But whatever it was, it was a major shift. that's yeah, ⁓ it's good to use all the tools that we have at our disposal to make shifts.

Karen Lynn Ingalls (19:57)
And I was very fortunate that the doctor that I went to recognized, because not very many people at that time recognized chronic fatigue syndrome. They may have thought it was psychological or they just didn't know. And he did, which ⁓ still we didn't know exactly a lot about it. People were finding out more about it. But at least I knew what was going on. So I was lucky.

In that respect too. Yeah.

Shannon Grissom (20:31)
Well, you've been through so much. mean, between the health, the endocritic, and then the Tubbs fire. Yeah. And your work completely shifted again after that. So let's get into a little more. We touched on it earlier, but the Tubbs fire, was so traumatic. Please.

Karen Lynn Ingalls (20:53)
Yeah.

Well, ⁓ you know, I've been through a lot before. And when I began painting again, I did like one painting at a time slowly as I was able to. So I had learned to adjust. ⁓ But when that happened, it didn't really hit me until I went there when we were finally able to see ⁓

the site and everything was, you know, it was just ashes. I had half of a barn, rehabbed chicken barn and it had a metal roof, had skylights, it had beautiful light and the metal roof had just kind of folded, it just melted over the remnants of the, you know, metal furniture pieces.

And I walked around and I saw in the ashes, there were two places where I saw little fragments of paintings. And I knew which paintings those were because of the color and where they were. And the next morning, I woke up and I felt just dead inside. It was just...

You know, it could have been really, really bad. And then I got a phone call from a friend who is at our local coffee house here in Calistoga, the Calistoga Roastery. And the person who was supposed to have a show there had canceled. And so the owner wanted to know, could I put something up? Now, I didn't have many paintings. did have my miracle paintings. But I thought...

wait a minute, I'm gonna do something. I'm gonna do something with the ashes. And ⁓ so I said, give me two weeks. I went back and I scraped up the ashes of my paintings and I made texture medium with acrylic medium and I took photographs of the melted metal roof and ⁓ there were

all kinds of spots left by the fire. And I could see landscapes in them. ⁓ I used those as a compositions for abstract landscapes that ⁓ had the ashes in them. So I was literally rising from the ashes. But ⁓ wow, it was, you know, and it was incredible therapy for me.

And then by sharing them on the walls of the coffee house where we were all recovering, know, a lot of my friends had lost their homes, their barns, or it had been really, really close. And we'd all been evacuated and we just, were, you know, rising from the trauma. And it was something we...

had all experienced. So to have it there in what was essentially like a little community center where everybody gathered, meant a lot. It meant a lot. Wow. Yeah.

Shannon Grissom (24:31)
Yeah, it's so.

Was there any sort of, I mean, you hear of, you know, like the Burning Man, how that started when, as a conscious decision to release work. Was there anything after the trauma, was there anything positive in starting fresh? Kind of like a clean slate.

Karen Lynn Ingalls (24:59)
Well, it led to unexpected things. So this is where I really learned that the challenges, take them on, make art, ⁓ they will lead you to someplace new. And I made a video about ⁓ the process.

and just a little video with still photos and music and captions. And I shared it on Facebook and it got re-shared and re-shared and re-shared. And it was speaking to people. ⁓ then I connected through that. I connected with a couple of other artists who had been through the same thing. They had both lost their homes and studios.

You know, had other artist friends who did that too. ⁓ But we shared studio space for a time and it led to things that I would never have expected. We were interviewed by a wonderful writer who's now retired for the San Francisco Chronicle. And a detail of one of my paintings was on the front page of the Chronicle.

I mean, it's like, how often does that happen for artists? There were art centers in the area and galleries that did shows about the art that all the artists in the area created because we weren't the only ones. We were all doing that because we needed to. And it mattered. And the art had power. It spoke to other people, too.

And the Petaluma Art Center had a show and they chose my painting to be the image of the show on the posters and it even was on a billboard. And it's like, how often does that happen for artists? And it just, again, reinforced the power of

what we can do with our creativity, how it can speak to people in ways that

You know, that matter, that just matter. So that was...

That was an incredible lesson. And it was, you know, a long climbing back, but literally, you know, we were rising from the ashes.

Shannon Grissom (27:53)
That's a common theme in your entire story. And I love that no matter what happens to you, you keep rising. You are such an inspiration. you. ⁓ For people starting out in a creative way of life, what would you want to protect to them so that they would be inspired?

Karen Lynn Ingalls (28:24)
Tap into your creativity. Do what you want to do. Don't let anything hold you back. Don't listen to the critics, inner or outer. Do you. Just do it. The more you do, the more you develop your skills, the more you'll be able to, you know, express what's in your heart, what's in your soul. ⁓

And don't copy somebody else because you know, for each person, they're the only one who can express what's in them. And that's what's important. It's important to know for each person to express their own voice, you know, whether it's visual or musical or written or in performance. It's that creativity.

that, you know, our perspective and we're the only ones who can do that. So it's like you do you and and make art because art has power.

Shannon Grissom (29:40)
It does. I think people can resonate with the authenticity that comes from from being true to yourself and just going for whatever is coming out of you. used to feel that my so I've got work that's more realistic and then work that's just way out there. And I used to think that the way out there wasn't wasn't as good that my abstract wasn't as good that

and that people wouldn't get it. And at times have different audiences for the different types of work that I create. But it's not any worse. It's not, you know, I was beating myself up about that kind of thing. And instead, I got to the point where I would honor what I was creating. Yeah, yeah. And it took me a while to do that. It really did. just, so.

Yeah, that's a good point. ⁓ I do want to touch on one other thing because you've done public art installations. Yeah, and I know you just you not only have you experienced much joy, but you share the joy by doing them. So could you tell us a little bit about your public art?

Karen Lynn Ingalls (30:47)
Yeah.

Sure. Well, this behind me was actually part of a design for one I did. This was some years ago. There was just so much division and hatred and, you know, children were being affected. And I thought, we're better than that.

And ⁓ I was photographing landscapes and I came to a stop sign and somebody on a fence had a handmade poster and it had the word hate in it. And I thought, everybody who sits at the stoplight has that radiating out of them. ⁓ we don't need that. And I just, you know, I went home and it stayed with me and

And I thought, what if somebody saw a heart instead? Maybe that would just make them smile. And maybe they would feel a little better. Maybe they would smile at somebody else and pass that along. Maybe that person would need that. Maybe they would need to have somebody smile at them. What if we could just lighten up and get into our comp-

our friendship, our love for each other, love for humanity. So ⁓ I started sketching out all kinds of ideas and brainstorming things and it wound up being two projects. One in Calistoga where ⁓ we made heart art that lined all the trees on the main street in town, Lincoln Avenue, and they were all

⁓ strung together with beads and they had inspirational quotations about love and kindness and compassion. And the word we love you translated into as many languages as Google could translate at the time. It was fun. So I gathered people in the community together, we all worked on it and it was amazing. And then, ⁓

Shannon Grissom (33:16)
Great.

Karen Lynn Ingalls (33:26)
Dear friend of mine was the elementary school teacher, the music teacher in St. Helena. And we put together something for that. She had her students for their spring concert do music that was all about love and kindness and compassion and friendship. And they made heart art too, between at the elementary school and with another friend of mine who is the art director at the St. Helena Boys and Girls Club.

They decorated, we decorated the auditorium walls and the entrance to the auditorium. So people saw all this heart art as they walked in. And then the kids were amazing and they got it. They totally got it. After she had them, she was talking with them about this and they started working on the songs. The kids started making posters and putting them in the entrance to the office to start.

clubs about friendship, the friendship club, the kindness club. Honestly, there were like three or four clubs that kids were trying to start. And I thought, how wonderful, they needed that. And ⁓ I loved seeing how the ripple effect happened, because you never know, right? You do something, you

don't know who it might impact that makes a difference for them. yeah. So that was the hearts project. Yeah, it meant a lot.

Shannon Grissom (35:06)
That's a great project!

Well, you talk about it reverberating out to the community. That's just awesome. Yeah.

Karen Lynn Ingalls (35:18)
So.

Shannon Grissom (35:20)
Where can people find more information about you or how can they find you?

Karen Lynn Ingalls (35:25)
They can find my artwork at KarenLynnIngles.com and also my teaching because I am a teacher. I've been teaching art to mostly adults for over 20 years now. And ⁓ that is at NapaValleyArtWorkshops.com. And ⁓ since COVID, I went online. I'm only teaching online right now.

And so people have been able to join us from all over the country without having to fly here, which is really nice.

So I've got some upcoming classes that will be starting this summer. ⁓ yeah, if people are interested, I hope they'll check it out.

Shannon Grissom (36:10)
that's great. We will put all of that in the show links. You you've just you're phenomenal, just phenomenal artist and such a joy, such an inspiration. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Karen Lynn Ingalls (36:24)
You are so welcome and thank you. just, I've enjoyed it tremendously.

Shannon Grissom (36:29)
⁓ that's great. Well, that's a wrap for today's show. Please be sure to like, subscribe, and share. We will see you on the next episode.