Louise Reynolds

Louise Reynolds is a fine artist from Hamilton, Scotland. Habitually reading the news informs the large scale figurative oil paintings she composes, by recontextualising prevailing and fad narratives into dystopic visions of the present and future. By riffing directly from current events whilst refusing photographic reference from the issues themselves, she rejects an ease of understanding which aligns with the confusion we experience in digesting the news in the internet age. In this she aims for her paintings to skim the surface of the recognisable, where the titles provide clues to their inspiration, but without full disclosure. Conceptually her work relates directly to the masculinist tropes of history painting since, like her, the painters who constructed the grand narrative works which are presented as fact were never physically present for the events they were paid by a biased commissioner to illustrate. In this she sees her own work as a revised and self-aware edition of history painting, poignantly in the era of fake news, but without an actual commissioner this is substituted with the news items which proliferate her online existence.
In her degree works she has referred to news items such as, the suicide of Jeffrey Epstein, the Australian wildfires, the prorogation of Parliament, the ban of ‘detox tea’ on Instagram, criticisms of activist Greta Thunberg, and the outbreak of COVID-19.