| John Reynolds |
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Born 1956, Auckland, New Zealand John Reynolds graduated from the Auckland University School of Fine Arts in 1978. He won the Montana Lindauer Award in 1988, received a Visual Arts Fellowship from the Arts Council of New Zealand in 1993 and won the Visa Gold Art Award in 1994. He has been involved in numerous solo and group exhibitions including: Distance Looks Our Way that toured Spain and the Netherlands in 1993 and a Very Peculiar Practice, City Art Gallery, Wellington 1995. Reynold’s painting continues to be drawing based, using the material of paint in a highly expressive manner that moves between sensuality and austerity. He has made three suites of prints, notably Millenium, an epic, one-off lithograph made in 66 sections, which was exhibited in 1996 at the McDougall Art Annex, Christchurch.The following is an extract from the Dunedin Public Art Gallery Newspaper – Summer 1996. John Reynolds is a painter who really sees himself more as "a drawer". Drawing, to him, is the language of a world where things bump into each other; the language of uncertainties, chance associations, of flashes of meaning. His diagrammatic drawings look like a fleeting moment of recognition noted, captured in haste. And as fragile as a house of cards. His work embraces life’s complexity, rather than trying to simplify it. It describes sensations with painted-drawn marks – fly-away lines, pictures, hieroglyphs, phrases, reversed words, unintelligible "collapsed" words, and floating punctuation are spun together, humming with the energy of their maybe-meaning. He makes the real the sensation of being in the gravitational pull of religion, history, literature, language, Irishness, mortality – things that are too big, too shifting to be understood as a whole. "People have this desire to explain the world – the scientists, the doctors, the philosophers… One thing art can do is resist givens, realise uncertainty, and life’s randomness. Painters must be willing to surrender to the subjective. Otherwise you’re fighting the properties and possibilities of painting. ‘Habit is a great deadener’, Samuel Beckett once remarked, ‘The only fertile research is excavatory, immersive, a contradiction of the spirit, a descent. The artist ia active, but negatively, shrinking from the nullity of extra-circumferential phenomena, drawn into the core of the eddy…’ "I’d rather have all these things I float and come up with than something less. I don’t want to do what I know I can do. When you rely on intuition to recognise significance, and you allow yourself to build up these shimmering vistas the truth of images springs up. Such imagery can sustain you." |
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John Reynolds work featured on this site: |
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