Jane Reynolds (NSW)

Jane Reynolds is a Sydney-based still life painter whose poised compositions investigate the relationships between colour, form and light. A consummate colourist, Reynolds revels in chromatic clashes and visually satisfying progressions, investing everyday objects with vibrance and visual delight. She paints these objects with stunning realism and places them into highly orchestrated groups, inventing arrangements that strike a balance between restraint and play. Through this, she gravitates towards abstraction, exploring still life as an interlocking system of formal elements. 

Within Reynolds’ subtly hyperreal compositions, commonplace objects appear familiar but idealised. She reduces a watering can or a biscuit box into simple, elegant forms with softened edges and no unwarranted creases or cracks. In this way, Reynolds dispenses with narrative to invite viewers to pause on formal beauty and complexity. And yet, she also ensures that these forms always feel tangible, rather than moving entirely into abstraction. Gently arranged into tight, orderly stacks or thrown into a dynamic jumble, her objects summon the urge to reach into the painted space and grasp the handle or topple the sphere. 

Influenced by mid-century design and hard-edge abstraction, Reynolds explores the optical play between flat plane and sculptural illusion. This is grounded in her two decades’ experience in traditional animation and visual effects, training in technical sleight-of-hand to create lifelike spaces through colour and light. In 2020, Reynolds commenced a full-time artistic practice, fusing a sophisticated understanding of tonal modelling and formal precision with the clarity and luminosity of oil painting.