Lloyd Rees

File:A South Coast Road.jpg

A south coast road (1951) by Lloyd Rees, painted at Werri beach

Lloyd Frederic Rees (March 17, 1895 – December 2, 1988) was an Australian landscape painter, and won the Wynne Prize for his landscape paintings twice (1950 and 1982). Most of his works are preoccupied with depicting the effects of light, and emphasis is placed on the harmony between man and nature. Rees' oeuvre is dominated by sketches and paintings, in which the most frequent subject is the built environment in the landscape.

Life and training

Rees was born in Brisbane, Queensland, the seventh of eight children of Owen and Angéle Rees. After formal art training, he commenced work as a commercial artist in 1917.

As well as winning the Wynne Prize on two occasions, Rees won the Commonwealth Jubilee Art Prize in 1957, the McCaughey Prize in 1971, and was in 1988 named as one of the Australian Bicentennial Authority's Two hundred people who made Australia great.

Rees had an unsuccessful engagement to sculptor Daphne Mayo, broken off in 1925. He married Dulcie Metcalf in 1926, however in 1927 Dulcie died in childbirth, Rees married again in 1931, to Marjory Pollard, mother to his son Alan. Rees' wife died on 14 April 1988 and, on 2 December that same year, Rees passed away.

Following Rees' death, Alan Rees and his wife Jancis gave to the Art Gallery of NSW all of Rees' surviving sketchbooks.

Rees in Europe

Rees first travelled to Europe in the 1920s, to meet with his fiancée Daphne Mayo, and made sketches, including many of Paris which were left accidentally on a bus in London at that time. While some of his works - and indeed his betrothal to Mayo - were lost, his connection with the landscapes of town and country France and Italy was to last a lifetime. Rees visited Europe again in 1953, 1959, 1966-67 and 1973, painting and sketching on all of his journeys.

The sketchbooks are now held by the Art Gallery of NSW, comprising approximately 700 images in pencil, carbon pencil, wash, watercolour and ballpoint pen. They reveal a capacity to characterise the texture and light of landscapes in these brief media - concerns that are equally evident in his paintings throught his career.

Rees' late works

Rees painted right up to his death, by which time he was in his nineties. His works of the last one to two decades in particular showed a preoccupation with the spiritual dimension of the relationship with and portrayal of the landscape, and this became the focus of the final book prepared in cooperation with the author Renée Free: Lloyd Rees: the last twenty years. His late works show an abstraction of form and a focus on the source and effects of light on the landscape, such as in his work The Sunlit Tower, painted when he was ninety-one years old, and winner of the Jack Manton Prize for 1987 (a prize awarded by the Queensland Art Gallery).

Rees' own philosophical views he expressed in the Epilogue to their book:

From quite an early age I was overwhelmed with the fact of endlessness... Planetary systems can blow up, but the universe is endless, and our little life is set in the midst of this, and everything in it has a beginning and an end... [This] gives to life a sense of mystery that is always with me.

Footnotes

References

• Renée Free, Lloyd Rees, Landsdowne, Melbourne, 1972
• Renée Free and Lloyd Rees, Lloyd Rees: The Last Twenty Years, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1990
• Janet Hawley, 'Lloyd Rees: the final interview', Sydney Morning Herald - Good Weekend Magazine, 15 October 1988
• Lou Klepac, Lloyd Rees Drawings, Australian Artist Editions, Sydney, 1978
• Hendrik Kolenberg, Lloyd Rees in Europe, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, 2002

Collections

• Art Gallery of New South Wales
• Art Gallery of Western Australia
• Darling Harbour Authority
• Australia's Parliament House
• Australian National Gallery
• Newcastle Region Art Gallery
• Queensland Art Gallery
• Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery
• University of Sydney
• University of Western Australia
• West Australian Institute of Technology

External links

• National Gallery of Australia
• Lloyd Rees sketchbooks online at the Art Gallery of NSW
• Lloyd Rees at Australian Art