Selfie with help from Ingrid Erns

Ingrid Erns was a noted Australian artist, born in Riga, Latvia on October 24th, 1919. Latvia in 1919 was embroiled in the 1918-1920 Latvian War for Freedom from Russia. It struggled under the sphere of the USSR for many years. Democracy finally returned to Latvia in 1989.

In her late teens, Ingrid left Latvia to study art in Paris where she soon became quite the star of her class. These were very troubled times, just before the start of WWII. However, things were soon to get far worse.

Some members of the Erns family were murdered by the Russians. Ingrid never talked about the horrors of the war years, but she and her parents somehow survived. They ended up in a German camp in 1945 where they were classed as displaced persons at the end of hostilities. Ingrid helped the family survive by doing portraits in pastel of the American officers who were supervising the refugees.

Ingrid and her parents subsequently arrived in Australia in 1948. She became a member of the Adelaide Royal Art Society where she was an extremely active member. Each year Ingrid would journey to Europe to plan and commence her paintings, primarily in Germany, Austria and Italy. She then finished the paintings in her studio in the Adelaide suburb of Evandale.

In the 1970s we became close friends, and Ingrid became a great fan of my travel films of Europe, with regular showing at her studio followed by viewings of her latest work.

Subsequently she asked me to pose for her portrait class, and my reward for sitting still for many hours was Ingrid's colour portrait of me.

Ingrid staged annual Adelaide exhibitions of her work from 1969 onwards, and this continued till shortly before her death on July 23rd, 1987 when she passed away at the age of 67 from liver cancer. Sadly she was never able to return to Latvia due to the presence of the USSR and her distrust of communism.

Her output of landscapes and portraits was prolific and her work lives on with us in the form of family portraits and more. She is greatly missed.