Cultivating the Dutch Tradition in the 21st Century, Jane Jones’ Hyperrealistic Floral Paintings
September 1 – November 30, 2023
Perfect conditions for a new and important form of painting aligned in the 17th century in the United Provinces of the Netherlands. Amsterdam had become the financial center of Europe with the continent’s highest income per capita. Global expansion of the Dutch East and West Trading Companies brought new goods with every shipment, including exotic botanical specimens. Secular acceptance of Scientific Method had begun to free scientific inquiry from religion and myth, while the big science of the day—exploration—manifest itself in collections of natural history specimens amassed by affluent collectors, who also collected art. Demand for floral art was supplied by painters who possessed scientific understanding and skill which they had honed as scientific illustrators. Collectively, this was the nexus of The Golden Age of Dutch Floral Painting.
The genre lives on today, but contextualized by modernity. In the paintings of Jane Jones, flowers are icons, but not merely of beauty or taxonomy. Her paintings embody a 21st-century sensibility of concern yet hope about destructive forces that puts nature in peril, and this layer has the transformative effect of elevating her paintings into prayers . . . reverent prayers for the botanical health of the world. Jane Jones explores flowers in exquisite detail. She also explores their fragility and their metaphysics. Her paintings celebrate beauty, but they also reveal the necessity to protect flowers. While Jane Jones has been a life-long student of 17th-century Dutch floral painting, she takes a contemporary stylistic approach to her own work through spare composition that excludes extraneous details of the external world in order to focus on a moment of elegance, harmony, and dignity. Consequently, her paintings seem to meditate on nature.
Having earned undergraduate degrees in biology and chemistry and a Master’s degree in Art History, Jane Jones says, “The most important things I have taken away from my science education is a deep respect for living systems and ecology, their inherent homeostasis, and the importance of precision when observing nature. . . . [while] years of teaching art history have taught me to dive deeply into the historical and social context of the lives of the great artists of past centuries, and to incorporate some of their techniques and ideas into my own artwork.”
Jane Jones’ paintings have won accolades and awards including an Award of Excellence in Blossoms II ~ Art of Flowers sponsored by The Susan K. Black Foundation, which premiered at The Naples Museum of Art in 2011, and the Floral Award in the Annual Exhibition of the International Guild of Realism in 2013 and 2018. She is the author of Classic Still Life Painting and is represented by galleries in Boston, Denver, New York, Santa Fe, and Scottsdale.
Cultivating Dutch Tradition in The 21st Century – Jane Jones’ Hyperrealist Floral Paintings, Produced by David J. Wagner, L.L.C., David J. Wagner, Ph.D., Curator/Tour Director.