The Realm of Visible Creation

A Recent visit to Kiama and Gerringong, in the Illawarra region on the South Coast of New South Wales, brought back vividly to mind the life and work of Lloyd Rees, one of this country’s greatest painters in the tradition of representational art. It was assisted, as a matter of memory, by the fact that a friend with whom we dined there (a distinguished former administrator, with now a more than passing resemblance to Rees) quite unselfconsciously sported to dinner the same type of black French beret that Rees habitually wore.

From the 1940s onwards, Rees and his wife Marjory shared with relatives a holiday cottage at Werri Beach near Gerringong, and so it came about that Rees painted some of his most outstanding Australian landscapes there in the Illawarra region. We thus decided on this occasion to traverse the Rees painting grounds, ranging from Kiama to Gerringong and on to Berry. It is a picturesque landscape of rolling hill country, combining ordered views of small holdings and pastures, interspersed with twists and turns.

On returning home and going back to Renee Free’s study of Rees, first published in 1972, and then turning the pages of Rees’s own The Small Treasures of a Lifetime, there stood out in this regard the oil A South Coast Road (1951), which so finely depicts the landscape around Gerringong and looking towards Kiama. As Free has well put it (referring to that other great magician of light, Claude) in this New South Wales South Coast region, Rees found his own southern Campagna.

It is obvious from Free’s writings and illustrations, and from Rees’s published reminiscences on his personal and painting career, that this landscape came to mean as much to Rees as the Italian places he often visited, rather as Alassio meant to Sir Edward Elgar, inspiring his In the South. Like that rich and lavish tone-poem, with its canto popolare local colour, Rees’s South Coast landscapes are deeply felt and closely observed renditions of the rhythms of the coastal hills and their russeted highlights. They provide a key to the outlook of this remarkable (and perhaps the most “European and Internationalist” yet distinctively “Australian”) artist.

It was delightful then to find, via the wonders of the internet, that we can all listen to an interview with Lloyd Rees by James Gleeson, in the James Gleeson Oral History Collection, available on the National Gallery of Australia’s website, and focusing on that Kiama picture. Rees always delighted and fascinated in his talk, and Free has noted his “conversational” style of writing, as seen in his Small Treasures. In speaking to Gleeson of the Kiama landscape oil, Rees is heard in those modestly accented tones of the “old Australians” of his generation; a Queensland and particularly a Brisbane voice; with perhaps the merest tinge to be heard of Rees’s Welsh and French ancestry.

It is a restrained man speaking, but one of rich experience and a wide recall of small but telling incidents, such as the art-loving Kiama municipal health inspector who liked to watch the progress of Rees’s open air painting sessions. Rees is perhaps one of the most engaging of artists to listen to speaking about their own works. Of course, Rees had also for many years taught in the History of Art at the School of Architecture in the University of Sydney and he was always much in demand as a giver of talks, even into his advanced old age. He evoked in the people he met, at all levels of Australian society, a special kind of warmth and high regard, such that in the years before his death in 1988 in his ninety-third year, he was indeed the “Grand Old Man” of Australian Art.

Rees’s career had a special kind of trajectory, somewhat similar in certain externals, to that of many Australian artists, but also different in other and vital respects. He progressed through an early training under Godfrey Rivers at Brisbane, then worked in commercial art and drawing, made a tentative start in painting works for exhibition in Sydney, a first trip to Europe in the 1920s, and a steady advance and honing of pictorial skills in draughtsmanship and then in painting. He stood apart somewhat from the influences of non-representational art reaching Australia in the 1920s and 1930s, whilst at the same time being friendly with some of its acolytes, such as Roland Wakelin. At some points, Rees experienced, but surmounted, major health problems.

Rees later developed a stronger and more lyrical landscape painting style, seen perhaps earliest in his Bathurst Hills Landscape of 1936. This style ripened and deepened in his landscapes of the 1940s, many of which were done from motifs encountered in the South Coast and Illawarra region. Trips to Europe in 1923–24 and particularly to France and Italy in 1953, 1959, 1967 and 1973 brought further transmutations and refinements into Rees’s increasingly distinctive style. He managed, by certain devices, to bridge his depiction of the Australian landscape with those European traditions of landscape painting seen as newly “rediscovered” in Rees’s own eyes. He evolved towards big pictures like Australian Facade (1965)

There emerged a powerful series of works, based on motifs of the land, the sea and the sky of Australia, observed in or from a very “European” mode of painting. Indeed, the beginnings of this were seen in the three works of the Song to Creation series, entitled Land, Sea and Sky (all 1969), which were followed by such major works as Country I (Beziers) (1968–69). That painting later came to be retitled A Tribute to France, and it sums up the synthesis of his mature manner, which is also reflected in the remarkable European sketches, as collected by Hendrik Kolenberg.

In his last years, Rees moved to an even more diffuse and luminous final style, which is highly reminiscent of those seen in the late works of the J.M.W. Turner, or of Claude Monet in his final years—again, a familiar or “traditional” trajectory. (One does not need to bother with theories or conjectures about declining eyesight in artists of advanced years.) Yet there always adheres around Rees’s works something that is recognisably of and from the Australian landscape, but writ large by a hand and mind that were profoundly “European” in the broadest and best sense. It was something quite different from either the “anti-traditionalism” or the pale imitation of contemporary international trends, which could be so readily seen in much of modernist Australian painting.

In this regard, there were some parallels with the case of the portraiture and genre works of Sir William Dobell (of whose later paintings some critics, such as the young Robert Hughes, could be scathing). However, Rees was somehow largely exempt from such attacks, and even Hughes in his 1962 survey of Australian art was warm in his praise for Rees’s achievement and stature as a painter. Rees’s best works managed to evoke the “stillness” or “otherness” or “timelessness” attributed to the Australian landscape in various cultural contexts and particularly in twentieth-century art here. Indeed, one of his larger works of this kind was called The Timeless Land (1965). It too, was the product of motifs Rees found in the South Coast–Illawarra region, as was Australian Facade. Rees thus represents a particular theme and “bridge” between local visions of Australian landscape and the European pictorial traditions.

For many, Rees was the contemporary Australian landscape artist of the last half of the twentieth century. In this, he was challenged, at least in the 1980s, only by Fred Williams. Sir Sidney Nolan dealt in a more mythic or surreal realm; and Brett Whiteley (for whom Rees was a friendly mentor) in a much more sensuous one.

The Gerringong, Kiama and other Illawarra paintings by Rees, mostly dating from the 1940s and 1950s, constitute a central and defining element in his overall oeuvre and achievement. Indeed, such pictures as The Road to Berry (1947) have become truly “iconic” (to use that much-vaunted word) in the realm of Australian landscape art and have duly influenced the likes of Whiteley amongst the later generations of artists in this country. Standing at the side of today’s highway, or on the hills around Gerringong, one can readily appreciate Rees’s wonderful vision and the precise and special qualities of his inspired renditions, captured in oils, of this delightful landscape, which even today after the severe drought conditions of recent years is still very green and memorable for its undulating hills, alongside its broad coastal vistas.

Rees’s Gerringong pictures remained important to his own sense of his artistic achievement and the inspiration he took from the places and scenes of the region. It is notable, as we can see from Lloyd Rees: The Last Twenty Years (first published in 1983), a text on which Free and Rees collaborated, that even at the height of his powers in the 1970s and in the phase of his final “diffuse” style of the 1980s, Rees also returned to motifs at Gerringong. Perhaps the most striking of these is his Fire Haze at Gerringong (1980), which, as Free and Rees explain, “before ‘Caloola’ [their Werri Creek cottage] was built, the Rees family went down to Burrawang in 1939 [and] memories and impressions of the great heat-wave of 1939 drove them further south, and inspired a painting forty years later”. Only by reading Rees’s own vivid description of his experiences of the fire haze in 1939 can one realise the extent to which those impressions lingered on. He wrote:

down at Gerringong I really tried to study formal painting, and the early pictures had very little colour. I think for years I never thought of anything other than the problem of painting, and in that rhythmical countryside. It did, in a way, follow naturally from the drawing period, but it gave me big rhythms that I loved so much. That period was one of quite intense work down there … Fire Haze at Gerringong is just a gentle picture, but it was a very important one for me.

Other notable Gerringong pictures of the later period are The Southern Sea, Gerringong (1970) and Morning on the Beach, Gerringong (1976) as well as a number of very meditative pencil and watercolour wash drawings, such as Omega Hills (1972) and The South Coast (1980).

I first encountered Lloyd Rees in a school reader, by way of a colour reproduction of his Still Life with Cauliflower and Egg (1931). Rees had worked for a time at the Queensland Government Printer’s Office in Brisbane. Later came sightings of his paintings and also of his distinguished head as sculpted and cast in bronze by Barbara Tribe, attendances at exhibitions of Rees’s works at Brisbane and Sydney and occasional brief meetings with the artist himself on such occasions. There later followed some correspondence with him in the 1980s about his work and particularly about his notable series of paintings of the interior of Chartres Cathedral.

He was an urbane, cultivated and wonderfully observant—but extremely modest—man. He could be very amusing indeed: it is recorded somewhere in print that he told an interviewer in the 1970s, a propos the sombre and rather static painting of The Sons of Clovis in the Nineteenth Century Gallery at the Art Gallery of New South Wales:

You know, in the 1920s, when we thought that we were all bright young things, we used to come in here and peer and point at this old-fashioned history painting and make the joke that we had only just come in to check whether the barge carrying Clovis’ sons had indeed moved any inches forward since our last visit! In those days, we could be that flippant about traditional paintings.

He was amply honoured by the Crown and by the Australian nation. The Companion of St Michael and St George (CMG) came in 1977, followed by the Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) in 1985. In the Bicentennial year of 1988, he was one of 200 Australians celebrated and saluted, at a function held at Parliament House in Canberra, for their outstanding contributions to the National Achievement.

Rees was interviewed sometime in the 1960s or 1970s by the late Laurie Thomas, formerly Director of the Art Gallery of Western Australia and of the Queensland Art Gallery and later art critic on the Australian. He presented, as usual, with all his humane urbanity and engagement, as well as his enthusiasm for youthful talents. The regard was mutual, for in a postscript to the 1978 book Lloyd Rees Drawings, Rees singled out and had reprinted the foreword to his 1973 New Grafton Gallery Exhibition in London. There Thomas wrote of

the massive strength of forms which preceded these gentler landscapes [and] the underlying bones which, never far beneath the flesh, are always clothed with a kind of civilised grace … His is a land which is romantic and eternal … not just the obvious desert, or outback, or scrub, but the underlying shapes which … have the air of being neither brash nor new but of having been inhabited for centuries, like Italy or Spain.

Rees was an open advocate for various environmental causes and the like, especially in the latter decades of his life. He made no secret of his allegiance with the (moderate) Left politically; yet he remained in many ways old-fashioned and he retained some of the admirable manners and mannerisms of his Edwardian youth. This was combined with a deeply European sense of beauty and orderliness as well as a strong commitment to the crafted aspect of his art.

Rees’s modesty before the judgment of others more eminent in their own fields was shown by his being suitably chuffed and delighted when the formidable Sydney architect Professor Leslie Wilkinson visited Rees and Marjory at the Northwood home that Rees had himself designed, and said to them on departing, “You have a very happy little building here.” Rees also delighted in Wilkinson’s deflation of pompous architectural jargon: for both, “a ‘Venetian blind’ was a Venetian blind, and not a ‘desolarisation unit’”.

Rees’s self-deprecating reserve also shows in his comment, made in the interview with Gleeson, in respect of his A South Coast Road (1951): “That is a very cultivated landscape. It belonged to the Potter family. I think a Miss Potter, who was a student at the university, more or less directed her parents to get a picture of mine.” That was authentic and vintage Lloyd Rees. The McCullochs have summed it all up: “Throughout his long career, his work was widely accepted by all factions, largely because of its underlying sincerity and unpretentiousness.” He was at base an artist.

If one had to nominate two of his greatest and most notable works, it would be hard to go past A Tribute to France (1968–69) and The Timeless Land (1965), representing the two poles, as it were, of his work on the European and Australian landscapes and the synthesis he effected. It must also be said that alongside the larger oil works such as those, done in the full ripeness of his mature style, there also stand the magnificent series of pen-and-wash drawings from his European Sketchbooks as exhibited at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2002, as well as his many exquisite pencil drawings done at various locations in Sydney and its environs in the 1930s.

However, the Gerringong pictures of the 1940s are the turning point and vortex of Lloyd Rees’s art. Works such as The Road to Berry (1947), Omega Pastoral (1950) and A South Coast Road (1951), the picture with which this article started, brought out in Rees the elements of the broad and effective style of his artistic maturity. Curiously, the very fine picture by which Rees is now perhaps best known to the Australian public at large, particularly as it has been widely reproduced and thus identified with him and his style, is The Harbour from McMahon’s Point, for which he won the Wynne Prize in 1950. It is one of a series of Sydney Harbour pictures, in which Rees excelled. Many of these harbourside works still feature in private collections there.

Although some of his works (notably the early drawings of the then unfinished St John’s Cathedral in Brisbane and of St Paul’s in London, as well as the later depictions of Chartres Cathedral and its environs) dealt with religious sites and traditions, there is little or nothing by way of religious themes as such, in Rees’s body of work. That probably springs from his professed agnosticism and leanings away from what is termed “organised religion” (a puzzling and canting phrase, as one wonders what other sort of religion there can be within the human experience).

Rees underwent a severe crisis upon the tragic death of his first wife Dulcie in 1928. He married Marjory Pollard in 1931 and thereafter made steady progress with his work and exhibitions. However, it is notable that aspirations towards and expressions of the numinous may be detected in such late, diffuse Rees works as the Song to Creation series (1969). It is also notable that the discerning collection of Australian artworks of religious and social significance, assembled at Newman College in the University of Melbourne, mainly by the eminent Jesuit Father Michael Scott, includes an outstandingly beautiful pen-and-watercolour-wash drawing by Rees of an Italian scene, featuring a church in a hill village in Tuscany. It is illustrated in colour in Christopher Marshall’s catalogue study A Deep and Sonorous Thing, which also points out that Rees was a member of both the Blake Society and of the Blake Prize’s Committee. Despite his agnosticism (and his habit of referring to Masses encountered in the Catholic churches he visited in Italy and France as “services”) Rees nevertheless enjoyed noting that his birthday was St Patrick’s Day.

Some years ago, the late Justin O’Brien, a prominent Australian artist long resident in Rome, was interviewed in connection with a symposium held at Florence on the cultural connexions of Italy with Australia. He made the observation that one of the reasons why the great majority of Australians who visit Italy feel quite at home there, is the fact that most of them, and particularly the Anglo-Celts, have deep family, religious and cultural roots in the wider European tradition, which itself embodied so much that was imparted by the Mediterranean civilisations and especially throughout the realms of the Roman empire. And this affinity is something intangible and quite apart from the more obvious attractions of plentiful southern sunlight, the landscape and the cuisine.

One very important aspect of Lloyd Rees’s landscape art is the way in which Rees interprets the European scene—most obviously in his extensive travel notebooks of drawings and watercolour, but also in certain key paintings—and then also re-interprets elements of the European landscape, particularly that of Italy and France, melding them into his vision of those parts of the Australian landscape he cherished. Primarily, the message is one of the rhythms that are imparted to a landscape, and especially to a pastoral landscape, by the “civilising” effect of sustained human habitation over long periods. Rees was not unique in this, but he did express that idea most eloquently. Of course, the big proviso is the manner of utilisation of the land and the human stewardship of what Nature provides. These traditional and moderating precepts are far from the “Greenery” that bombards us today, with its much wider and ideologically driven agendas, its narcissism and its bleak existentialism.

Lloyd Frederic Rees AC CMG was born at Yeronga in Queensland on March 17, 1895. He died in Hobart on December 2, 1988, only months after being feted at Parliament House, Canberra, as one of the 200 greatest Australians, at a Bicentennial dinner where he was seated between the Governor-General and the Prime Minister. He was one of the leading artists of his epoch, and in addition to the pictorial works he left for posterity, he made enormous contributions to the cause of art in Australia and to the national cultural life over many decades, through his work with, and his office-bearing in, the Society of Artists, the Australian Committee for UNESCO, the Public Fountains Committee, and as adviser to various public galleries.

He invoked as “influences” upon him not only the Old Masters such as Titian and Rubens (the latter he particularly admired), but also some of the modern French masters, as well as various Australian painters from Streeton to Nolan. However, Rees was also adamant that once started, a painting, in a sense, “creates” or “develops” itself and its own necessities; and that therefore the artist must focus upon that creation of the picture itself as it is painted—and not be harking back to any particular precedent.

Interviewed by James Gleeson, Rees readily agreed with the observation that he seemed to spend more time contemplating the picture surface and the development of the painting itself than he ever spent in contemplation, for any “reproducing”, of the motif before him. Rather, Rees said, he was attentive to the overall atmosphere around him. He also insisted upon covering the whole of the canvas at each session, however briefly; rather than any piecemeal efforts spread over sessions. This accounts for his ability to capture and present an “image” and a general rhythm or broad structure, rather than a mere depiction of details.

Rees was adept at this, the very gist of memorable landscape painting; rendering and making permanent for us, not only effects of a fleeting nature, such as those of light upon a scene, but also the more enduring reality encountered in the Australian or other landscape painted. He combined, on the Australian scene, the artistic stature of a Henry Moore with a visually poetic standing reminiscent of, say, a Robert Frost; yet always with a touch of internationalism within his painterly approach. Rees won the prestigious Wynne Prize for Landscape Painting twice. Nor was he just a good painter or colourist: he was a great draughtsman as well; and some would argue his drawings of the 1930s are his best works.

The title of this essay, “the realm of visible creation” is a quotation from Rees’s article titled “What is Good Drawing?” which appeared in Art in Australia in February 1940. There, whilst acknowledging the role and place of the modernist avant-garde, he affirmed his “personal belief that depictive art will remain wedded to natural appearances [and] that drawing will continue to be the link binding them together”.

Lloyd Rees is represented in the collections of all the major Australian public galleries.

Douglas Hassall wrote on Ursula Hoff and Poussin’s Crossing of the Red Sea in the April issue.