The Wanderer’s Way: Charles Inge on Finding His Voice in a Fragile World
Meet Charles Inge, Programme Artist for Affordable Art Fair Battersea Autumn, 14 – 18 October 2026.
Affordable Art Fair
Tuesday 11 August, 2026
Charles Inge, Programme Artist for Affordable Art Fair Battersea Autumn, 14 - 18 October 2026.
This October, our Affordable Art Fair Battersea Autumn campaign spotlights The road unravels. Every step becomes a chance, by Charles Inge, represented by Pigment Gallery. The work belongs to Charles’s Wanderer series, a body of paintings that reads the state of the world through one small, lost figure moving across vast, dissolving landscapes. Charles has also been commissioned to create House of Cards, a 7-metre tall installation for the fair’s main entrance.
Starting young
“I always wanted to be an artist,” he says. “My dad was an amateur artist and a classics teacher. I remember he bought me my first watercolour set when I was about four years old, and by the time I was five I had sable brushes.”
Charles went on to graduate with a first from the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford and was offered places at both the Royal College of Art and the Royal Academy. But he didn’t take either. London was too expensive for a young painter, so he went into advertising instead, joining his partner, a copywriter, as her Art Director. The two worked as a creative team for years: enjoyable work, but not painting.
On his 50th birthday, he quit and moved to the Isle of Wight. He thought: “Advertising is a young man’s game. If I don’t paint now, I never will.”
Return to painting
For two years, Charles painted almost anything: portraits, landscapes, abstract work. He entered competitions, winning several, but nothing quite felt like him. So he went back to art school, spending two more years at Turps Art School in London, before settling into a studio in Soho. When that studio was knocked down during the 2020 lockdown, the move to the Isle of Wight became permanent.
It was there, away from London, that his current style took shape, close to the landscape that inspired it. “I live surrounded by fields and dunes. You see the seasons change, the tides come in, the cliffs erode, the flowers come up and die,” he says. “I think all my abstract forms are quite organic. In summer my colours are brighter, in winter, cooler, softer.”
The Wanderer Series
The figure at the centre of the Wanderer series, and of the campaign artwork, began as a faded memory. Charles’s father owned a valuable 16th-century book of woodcuts, and one image stayed with Charles since art school: a lone traveller. When he came to recreate it years later, he learned the original actually showed two men, farmers caught wandering in a storm. He combined them into one.
The series might have stayed a simple study in figuration, but world events changed its direction. As Charles worked, Russia invaded Ukraine, and a sense that the world felt fragile crept into the paintings. What started as abstract compositions began to read as landscapes. Once they did, they seemed to need a figure to give them scale, a small, out-of-time wanderer, lost in a world he doesn’t quite understand.
From there, the series took on the shape of a hero’s journey: a world that breaks, a figure who sets out, gets lost, nearly gives up, and finally dissolves back into the landscape he’s crossing. Each title marks a stage in that arc without spelling it out, including The road unravels. Every step becomes a chance, the painting chosen for this year’s campaign, and the first time Charles fully merged the figurative and the abstract in one series. “I try not to make too much distinction between figuration and abstraction,” he says. “I just paint what my gut tells me.”
House of Cards
House of Cards, a new installation commissioned for the fair’s entrance, is a 7-meter tall stack of cards balanced precariously on top of each other, a simple metaphor for a fragile world. The same wandering figure appears on every card face, tarot-like. Alongside it, Charles is painting a separate set of larger canvases, around a metre by half a metre, where the wanderer, often small enough to miss in the original series, takes centre stage.
Fragile, and worth hoping for anyway
Across everything Charles makes, the towering cards, the dissolving wanderer, the seasonal abstractions, one idea recurs: the world is fragile, and worth hoping for anyway. Living on the island, watching the same cycle of erosion and regrowth play out year after year, has turned that optimism into something like conviction. “Spring always comes back,” he says, echoing Hockney. “It’s good news.”
Find more from Charles Inge at Pigment Gallery’s stand at Affordable Art Fair, Battersea Autumn, 14 – 18 October, alongside over 100 other exhibiting galleries and thousands of beautiful artworks.
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