CULTIVATING THE DUTCH TRADITION IN THE 21st CENTURY
Jane Jones' Hyperrealist Floral Paintings

Produced by David J. Wagner, L.L.C.

Sponsored By: Culture Trove - A Traveling Exhibitions Database for Museum Professionals

Janejones.com Exhibition Page

FINE ART CONNOISSEUR Magazine January 2022 Issue Article: Jane Jones's Hyperrealist Floral Paintings

Jane Jones has an admirable gift for banishing extraneous details in order to focus on the elegance of flowers, juxtaposing their organic forms with the geometric rigidity of their vases, and the stones she sometimes includes, and even of the square or rectangular canvas itself. Her still life paintings highlight what Jones calls the “everyday triumphs of nature” and the “power, beauty, and fragility of life,” none of which should ever be taken for granted.
Peter Trippi, Editor-in-Chief, Fine Art Connoisseur, New York, NY

From Genesis 2:8-9 where God ‘planted a garden eastwards in Eden’ to 17th century Jan Van Kessel the Elder’s exquisitely detailed portrayal of Vertumnus—guardian of gardens, to early 20th century works like Odilon Redon’s Flowers in a Turquoise Vase (1905), human aesthetic rapture has found its myriad safe havens and perennial longing in botany. Jane Jones, like few contemporary American painters, has invented a most elegant way of communicating the rapture and metaphysics of a flower. She does so with a technically photorealistic honesty and fluency that is poignant and astonishing. Jones’ work is both stark and lush; a vivid wake-up call. It declares the innocence, vulnerability and gorgeous allure of the more than 370,000 flowering plant species on Earth. Her work will stand as a unique rallying cry, an open and perfumed invitation to be re-enchanted by all that grows and co-evolves with us.
Michael Charles Tobias, President, Dancing Star Foundation, Sante Fe, NM

Essay by Jane Jones Published by The Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere Stanford University, Palo Alto, California

CULTIVATING THE DUTCH TRADITION IN THE 21st CENTURY

INSTALLATION PHOTOGRAPHS

PREMIERE

Pearl Fincher Museum of Fine Arts
January 29 to May 14, 2022, Houston, Texas

TOUR

May 27 – July 17, 2022
Dane G. Hansen Memorial Museum
Logan, Kansas

August 15 to November 15, 2022
Brookgreen Gardens
Murrells Inlet, South Carolina
Installation Photographs

January 21 - April 23, 2023
Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum
Chicago Academy of Science
Chicago, Illinois

May 5 - July 3, 2023
Holland Museum
during The Annual Tulip Time Festival
Holland, Michigan

September 1 - November 30, 2023
The Evelyn Burrow Museum
Wallace State Community College
Hanceville, Alabama

ADDITIONAL DATES AVAILABLE

INTRODUCTION

Link to Floral Art History by Exhibition Curator

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.

Jane Jones' Hyperrealist Floral Paintings Prospectus English Version (615 KB)
Jane Jones' Hyperrealist Floral Paintings Prospectus Dutch Version (2.6 MB)
Jane Jones' Hyperrealist Floral Paintings Prospectus French Version (646 KB)
MICHAEL CHARLES TOBIAS, Meditations on the Flowers of Jane Jones

SAMPLE EXHIBITION ARTWORKS All Photographs © Jane Jones Cultivating The Dutch Tradition in the 21st Century is Comprised of 25 Floral Paintings in Oil on Canvas and Board
Sheltered 2012, 17 x 24	Ascension 2014, 10 x 12.5
The Triumph of Nature 2013, 52 x 29	Gilded Stars 2014, 42 x 58
Hello Again 2016, 28 x 18	Transformations 2012, 53 x 35
Handle with Care 2016, 27 x 28	Survivors 2016, 74 x 47
Convergence 2017, 37 x 20	Rose Duet 2018, 35 x 32
Three Graces 2018, 32 x 66	Special Occasion 2018, 35 x 32
On the Edge 2020, 34 x 40	Sunlit Stars 2020, 43 x 42
Circle of Light 2019, 24 x 24	Party of Two 2019, 59 x 78
Mysteries at Risk 2021, 47 x 72	Time of Change 2021, 46 x 36

Return to top paragraph

David J. Wagner, L.L.C.
Phone: (414) 221-6878
davidjwagnerllc@yahoo.com

Davidjwagnerllc.com is the official website of David J. Wagner.
All documents, images and general contents of this website are © David J. Wagner, LLC.
Member A.A.M., American Alliance of Museums
I.C.O.M., International Council of Museums