REES, Lloyd

A profound love of nature pervades the work of Lloyd Rees and this inner response to landscape, combined with a similar regard for architecture was the prime sources of his inspiration.

Lloyd Rees was born in 1895 at Yeronga, Brisbane, the seventh of eight children by his Welsh father and French Mauritian mother. In 1910 he studied at Brisbane Technical College and was taught drawing by F. Martyn Roberts. He began exhibiting drawings with the Queensland Art Society 1912 and was a full time art student in 1915.

Rees arrived in Sydney in 1917 and was employed as a commercial artist in the studio of Smith and Julius to be on call for drawings at 4 pounds a week. His pencil drawings of Sydney during the 30’s established him as one of Australia’s greatest draughtsmen. He visited Italy and France in 1923/4 and 1953, he felt ‘sympatico’ with the landscape and returned to paint it through the 50’s and 60’s.

As one of the great interpreters of the Australian landscape his 60’s works became more entrusted with texture (impasto) and captured the rocky sandstone landscapes with total authority. With advancing age and deteriorating eyesight he became increasingly obsessed with painting light. Lloyd Rees died in Hobart on 2 December 1988.

‘Light and Sun became the major subjects of his works, eventually gaining the confidence to paint the sun itself’

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