Acclaimed for the contemplative stillness and highly skilled execution of her still-lives, Jude Rae is also much admired for her portraits and architectural interiors.
Read MoreDrape Paintings
Rae's early paintings often involved sections of language juxtaposed with images of crumpled sheets that were spatially ambiguous and evocative. An absent sleeping body could have just left indentations on the bed or the sheets might have been shrouds covering a recumbent corpse.
Rae was very interested in the writing of Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault, a French psychiatrist trained in art who studied the traditional dress of Moroccan women and the folding of the draped heavy white cloth that they wore. Clérambault's Dream (1994) is like the musical arrangement of a long, pale grey, rippling curtain; Counterpoint (1996) features taut stretched diagonal folds.
Usually austere and avoiding gentility, Rae's still life paintings exude an industrial ambience, while referencing earlier periods in art history, especially Dutch, Italian, and French still life, even though many works have a modernist emphasis of a flat picture plane and a compositional interest in geometry.
Through her studying of artists like Jean-Siméon Chardin, Pieter Claesz, and Giorgio Morandi, Rae's elegant images of fastidiously positioned ceramics and glassware on tabletops became in the new millennium what she is best known for. Their surfaces rendered under soft, raking light, they blend realism with abstraction, for although the perspectival space is deliberately shallow, the reflections on flat planes or curvilinear glazed forms play an important role. Sometimes she includes contemporary objects like buckets of paint or gas cylinders, as in SL 355 (2016) or SL 306 (2013).
The subjects of Jude Rae's portraits include many public Australian and New Zealand dignitaries and personalities, which she has been commissioned to paint. These include Dame Sian Elias, Linda Burney MP, Michael Horton, and Professor Frank Fenner.
Rae's more recent large paintings of dark shadowy rooms with glowing windowed corridors and ambiguous reflecting vistas are often ominous and moody, designed to extend the real space of the room the work is hung in. Architectural space itself—illusory or palpable—is Rae's subject matter, as is light passing through large sheets of glass. See for example Interior 370 (foyer 1) (2017).
