Isabelle Chouinard

Her pieces emerge from carefully arranged tableaux constructed within her Melbourne studio. Every vessel, branch, bloom and piece of fruit is selected for its visual potential and placed in dialogue with the others. Huddled together upon tabletops, the artist works her subjects – finding harmonies and dissonances of shape, colour and weight.

Although trained as a figure and portrait painter, Chouinard has found in still life a greater sense of freedom. The genre offers a space for looser experimentation and play. “I’ve always felt I could explore more freely with composition and colour with the subject of still life,” she says. 

Classical and contemporary approaches to picture-making coexist across the series. The frontal, measured perspective of Gum Tree Branch gives way to the decidedly more contemporary elevated viewpoint of Seven Lemons, while Peaches and Pewter Jug similarly adopts an unusual angled perspective.

Chouinard arranges her subjects to receive illumination from a studio window, favouring the soft, pearlescent conditions of overcast days. Under this gentle light, surfaces flicker alive. Pewter vessels absorb muted reflections, fruit glows with unlikely intensity, and foliage unfolds in passages of restrained colour. Throughout the exhibition, chromatic harmonies move from rich earth tones to luminous neutrals and brighter notes. 

Working exclusively from life, Chouinard remains committed to the traditions of observational painting. Some works are built slowly through successive layers, while others are completed alla prima in a single sustained encounter. Preliminary sketches and oil studies often precede the final painting, allowing colour relationships and compositional structures to evolve before they are committed to linen, timber or aluminium panel. Each support is prepared by the artist herself, underscoring the deeply handcrafted nature of the practice.

Chouinard trained at the Julian Ashton Art School in Sydney, where she later taught still life and figure painting. Her studies also took her abroad, to the Atelier de Brésoles in Montreal and France’s Studio Escalier under Timothy Stotz and Michelle Tully. She has been a finalist in the Portia Geach Memorial Award and the Lester Portrait Prize (2025), and has also been recognised in the Mosman Art Prize, the Eutick Memorial Still Life Award and the Doug Moran Portrait Prize. In 2021, she was awarded the Henry Jones Art Prize for her painting By the River.