Alan Reynolds: A Legacy

Alan Reynolds was born in Newmarket in 1926. After serving in the Second World War, Reynolds joined Woolwich Polytechnic School of Art in 1948, before winning a scholarship in 1952 to the Royal College of Art. In 1957, he married Vona Darby, who became his lifelong companion and supporter. During these years he established himself as a successful landscape painter, earning a reputation for his neo-romantic, dreamlike depictions of Suffolk fields and Kentish hop gardens.

In the late 1950s, however, Reynolds’ work underwent a radical transformation, turning his back on nature and embracing pure ‘concrete’ abstraction inspired by artists such as Paul Klee and Piet Mondrian. By the late 1960s, Reynolds had abandoned painting altogether, pursuing theories of structure, geometry and rhythm through his constructed cardboard reliefs, woodblock printing and tonal modular drawings. This practice – what former Kettle’s Yard Director Michael Harrison described as his ‘true voice’ – would dominate the remaining fifty years of his career.

Reynolds had a very close relationship with Harrison and Kettle’s Yard. He was the subject of a solo retrospective exhibition in 2003, and later an extensive monograph written by Harrison in 2011, three years before his death.