‘New Works’

For her debut at Michael Reid Southern Highlands, Isabelle Chouinard presents New Works — a title as spare and direct as the practice it reflects. It speaks to Chouinard as a technician quietly at work in the studio, methodically refining the fundamentals of her craft.

In New Works, Chouinard turns her attention to ordinary subjects — a head of garlic, a bowl of plums, a simple vessel — elevated through careful observation. Painting simply is deceptively difficult: here, colour lies within colour, light suffuses every form, and tonal harmonies are exquisitely resolved.

In Three Persimmons (2025), the orange of the fruit breathes softly against the delft-blue cloth beneath it, the hue suspended somewhere between solidity and air. In Capsicums (2025), the forms glow with inner light, while White Peaches (2025) transforms a tumbling arrangement into a study of velvety tone and delicate shading.

Chouinard’s approach is grounded in the atelier tradition and shaped by her study of the old masters, as well as a lifelong engagement with art history — an interest that reaches back to her earliest memories. “I used to watch my grandfather paint in his studio,” she reflects. “These days, I always look at art history, from Antiquity to the present day.”

She 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 to France’s Studio Escalier under Timothy Stotz and Michelle Tully — extending the discipline cultivated at Julian Ashton and further embedding her work in the lineage of classical painting.

This rigorous practice has earned her wide recognition, both in Australia and abroad. She is currently a finalist in the Portia Geach Memorial Award and has previously been a finalist in the Mosman Art Prize, the Eutick Memorial Still Life Award, the A.M.E. Bale Travelling Scholarship and Art Prize, and the Doug Moran Portrait Prize. In 2021, she was awarded the Henry Jones Art Prize for her painting By the River.