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Lloyd Rees / Australia 1895–1988 / The sunlit tower 1986 / Oil on canvas / 107 x 122cm / Gift of Alan and Jan Rees through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 1996 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Lloyd Rees/Licensed by Viscopy
Lloyd ReesThe sunlit tower 1986
Not Currently on Display
In the last two decades of Lloyd Rees’s life, the sun and light had become the main subjects of the artist’s work. Colours became translucent and the solidity of earth and rock was replaced by the fluidity of water and sky.
This final phase of his practice is exemplified by the pale, elemental and transcendental The sunlit tower. The work was painted in Hobart in December 1986. The ‘tower’ of the title is the Wrest Point Casino, but the artist has rendered it mystical in form. Rees considered his later paintings to be ‘visionary works’. He said:
I’ve inevitably moved into a visionary world, because before my eyes started to get weaker I’d lifted my whole key and I worked with just a slight motivation and then built the picture round it, never really topographic.1
Lloyd Rees created this painting when he was 91 years old. The work won the Queensland Art Gallery’s Jack Manton Prize in 1987.
Endnotes:
1. Lloyd Rees, quoted in Bettina MacAulay, The Jack Manton Prize 1987: Recent Works by Fourteen Australian Artists [exhibition catalogue], Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1987, p.11.
Lloyd Rees was born in Brisbane on 17 March 1895. He studied at the Central Technical College and was well known for his sketches of Brisbane. Rees moved to Sydney in 1917 to work for Sydney Ure Smith at the Smith and Julius Studio, one of Australia’s earliest advertising agencies to use artworks and colour printing in their campaigns.
Ure Smith commissioned Rees to draw the architecture and landscapes of Sydney. Throughout his career, Rees documented his observations of Brisbane buildings, streets and landscapes, and his fascination with the effect of light on his subjects.
In his later years, Rees’s works became more abstract as he began to focus specifically on the sources and effects of light. Despite his rapidly failing eyesight, Rees continued to paint, claiming that a benefit of his failing sight was that he was able to look directly at the sun.
Discussion Questions
1. Can you name any novels, movies or fairy tales that feature narratives about towers? Make a list and look for common threads in these stories, e.g. characters, plot, symbolism.
2. Rees referred to his later paintings as ‘visionary works’. What makes an artwork visionary? Explain how The sunlit tower is a visionary work. As a class, discuss artists, writers, politicians or musicians who could be considered visionary.
Classroom Activities
Create a still-life by placing a solitary object into a space filled with natural light. Blend soft pastels together in order to depict the light in the positive and negative spaces of the scene.