Description
Jana Reinecke (SA 20th Century) WOMAN IN BLUE, signed, dated 1988, mixed media on paper, 41cm by 27,5cm
Jana is renown for her expressionistic approach. Emotions is more important than the technical study of human form.
THE EXPRESSIONISTIC ART OF JANA REINECKE
(A critique in embryo of the artistic work in pastels, charcoal sketching, impressionism, water-colour and oils)
Jana was born in Krugersdorp in 1956 and a brief five years later the family moved to Pretoria. Her artistic talent flowered even before she became a teenager and at the youthful age of ten years, Jana was included in painting and drawing classes.
This culminated in her studying art at the University of Pretoria.
In 1977, at the age of 22, she married and six months later she and her husband moved to a farm in the OFS, near Tweespruit. That same year she came into contact with Fr. Frans Claerhout, the well-known Belgian-born priest, himself a self-taught painter with a profoundly artistic temperament. He encouraged Jana and broadened both her own broadened artistic expertise and personal relationship with a growing awareness of the immense possibilities that could be opened to her, by embracing life, colour, boldness and personal self-expression. She found that the medium of oils on paper, often displayed in what some might consider naive art, was well suited to her temperament.
Jana makes no claims for detailed photographic-styled portraiture nor for the exact rendition of facial features. She prefers to present the simplicity of childhood and adolescence by outlining eyes, eyebrows, nose and mouth in oval, oft angelic format, which perfectly represents innocence and acceptance of life's values to the trusting child.
Colouring? Vibrant and imaginative,expressionistic contrasting bursts of colour from cobalt and ultramarine sky-blues to cadmium reds, oranges and yellows,vivid sap greens and poignant purples.
They all slot-in together, often somewhat amazingly, presenting to the viewer a moment in time captured picturesquely by Jana's descriptive brushes and oils on her palette. It is the balance she achieves betwixt human subject matter and nature's additive natural beauty that immediately attracts the viewer's eye. Her canvases almost shout at you,I am here!You cannot ignore me!and indeed that silent command speaks more forcefully than any outburst from a human tongue.
Finally, a word or two about Jana's depiction of skin-texturing that accurately conveys the soft tranquility of a child's features.
It is delicately applied and just as delicately enhanced (in her pastel work) by a light application of burnt sienna shadowing around the eyes, nostrils and lips. It is this colour-toning (never overdone) that lends a touch of human warmth to an otherwise charcoal-on-white rendition.
Her symbolism also cannot be faulted.
One further observation rests in the finely honed characterization of her observer faculties. That ability to sum-up an attitude in another person's physical response to, perhaps, pain or any other from of suffering. Jana depicts this as a defensive upliftment of the shoulders, as if to ward-off a threatened or imagined attract, an attitude of self-defense, so understandable in this physically antagonistic world in which we now find ourselves.
I truly believe her to be one of the most poetically inspired talents in this era of present-day South African art.