Dauphin Bleu

About Dauphin Bleu

This large abstract contemporary painting by Jennifer Hornyak has a floral theme and features the colour blue.

Celebrated internationally as a superb artist, Jennifer Hornyak has produced colourful, evocative, and elegant paintings for more than four decades. Her intimate style has long drawn inspiration from German Expressionism and 20th-century French Fauvism, including the work of Henri Matisse. Yet her distinctive visual language remains resolutely modern, occupying a space between figuration and abstraction.
In recent years, much of her work has explored floral themes; however Hornyak’s flowers transcend mere representation. Her potent imagery is universal--acting instead as metaphors for life. She refers to them as ‘flowerscapes.’
Jennifer Hornyak frequently experiments with acrylics as an underpainting for oil. She works intuitively, selecting colours and building opulent layers of paint to achieve depth, dimension--light and shadow and a sensuous texture that transforms the visual experience into a tactile one.
Dauphin Bleu reflects the familiar dark palette of the European masters she studied early in her career. As is characteristic of Hornyak’s practice, the composition is enlivened by unexpected elements: expressive passages of deep blue, forest green, and chartreuse are punctuated by a shock of colour—a bright orange that propels the work into a contemporary realm.

FRAMED
54.5 × 51.5 in 138.43 × 130.81 cm

“We cannot reproduce nature, nor should we want to. All we can do is see and feel and aim to transcend ourselves.” Jennifer Hornyak

“Her appeal to the unconscious was impressionistic like an invitation to the garden of the soul.” Bernard Théoret, Art Reviewer

Jennifer Hornyak studied at the Grimsby School of Art in England. In 1961, she moved to Montreal where she attended McGill University, the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal and the Centre Saidye Bronfman. Hornyak has exhibited throughout North America and Europe including the Paris World Exhibition in 1987 where her work was shown alongside that of Modigliani, Picasso and van Dongen. Jennifer Hornyak’s work is represented in many private and corporate collections including Bombardier Transport, Burroughs Wellcome, McCarthy Tétrault, Power Corporation and Hyatt Regency Hotel. She works and lives in Montreal.