Alan Reynolds
(1926 - 2014)

Alan Munro Reynolds was a British painter born on 27 April 1926 at Newmarket, Suffolk, where his father worked as a stableman. He studied at the Woolwich Polytechnic from 1948 to 1952 and in 1954, and at the Royal College of Art from 1952 to 1953. He taught at the Central School of Art and Design from 1954 to 1961, and from 1961 or 1962 at Saint Martin's School of Art, where he became a senior lecturer in painting in 1985. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the National Museum of Canada, the V&A and the Tate among others. He was known first as a landscape painter, but changed to a totally abstract style from 1960. He lived and worked in Kent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Reynolds_(artist)

Winter Seeding Hillside
1953
Oil on hardboard
76,5 x 101,5 cm
National Galleries Scotland
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/826

'Winter Seeding Hillside’ is an example of Reynolds’ painterly style of the 1950s. The landscape is composed of expressionistic, bold brush strokes of muted colours, which help suggest a winter scene. The brash black, and simplification of tree-like structures into jagged shapes, focuses attention towards a skull-like form near the centre, and calls to mind the work of the artist William Gear from the early 1950s. In 1952 the critic Herbert Read grouped the work of several emerging sculptors under the tag, “the geometry of fear”, and although this painting could be viewed in this vein, Reynolds was more concerned with creating a structured balance between the horizontal and vertical forces in the composition.