Lloyd REES

Australian 1895–1988

Drawing was an essential component of Lloyd Rees’s practice throughout his long life. Born in Brisbane, Rees moved to Sydney in 1917. Here he soon became known for his precisely drawn pen-and-ink images, often of architectural subject matter. In the later 1920s, following both personal tragedy and ill health, Rees abandoned painting and, until the mid 1930s, focused specifically on drawings of his surrounding environment. Rees recalled in his memoirs:

Drawing was simply an obsession and I was completely absorbed in the discovery of form and composition. The drawings were by no means naturalistic … for there were things brought in and things left out. They were highly worked and I had an intense interest in the manipulation of them. I drew in the morning and then took the work home and looked at it in the afternoon and if I saw anything superfluous, I rubbed it out.1

In these highly finished works, drawn with a sharp pencil on fine paper, Rees’s compositional and tonal acuity, meticulous attention to detail and fascination with geological formations are apparent. One of the subjects Rees drew a number of times was a hillside in Waverton, a northern habourside suburb near his home. In Waverton, 1932, Rees focuses on the textural variations of the land and buildings on the distant hill, towards which the viewer’s eye is led by the sweep of receding fences. This drawing complements another held in the National Gallery of Victoria collection, Rock face, Waverton, North Sydney, 1933, in which Rees explores the central rocky outcrop from further down the hill. In 1932 Sydney Ure Smith wrote: ‘Lloyd Rees has surpassed all his previous work with these pencil drawings. Indeed they stand alone in Australia as perfect examples of the craft’.2

1 L. Rees, Peaks and Valleys: An Autobiography, Sydney, 1985, p. 166.

2 S. Ure Smith, ‘Pencil drawings by Lloyd Rees’, Art in Australia, no. 43, Sydney 1932, p. 55.

Alisa Bunbury