‘Winter Seeding Hillside’ is an example of Reynolds’ painterly style of the 1950s. The landscape is composed of expressionistic, bold brush strokes of muted colours, which help suggest a winter scene. The brash black, and simplification of tree-like structures into jagged shapes, focuses attention towards a skull-like form near the centre, and calls to mind the work of the artist William Gear from the early 1950s. In 1952 the critic Herbert Read grouped the work of several emerging sculptors under the tag, “the geometry of fear”, and although this painting could be viewed in this vein, Reynolds was more concerned with creating a structured balance between the horizontal and vertical forces in the composition.