realm of light and wonder
How some paintings reminded me of the elements and of the interior life some of us live
Top of the list for Hobart this past week was visiting the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, a dreamy sandstone building over the harbour. I wanted to stand and gaze at some paintings for as long as I wanted to without a teenager or a child beside me moaning about how long it was taking.
I couldn’t have found a more perfect subject for this than Lands of Light, the retrospective exhibition of Lloyd Rees’ work.
He wasn’t a painter I knew: an Australian who began in Sydney and then came to live in Tasmania in later life. This exhibition is beautifully curated with a selection of his Tasmanian work across three spacious rooms with perfect art gallery bones - white walls, parquet floors.
Rees began producing when commissioned to do architectural drawings of buildings around Sydney. I’m not especially enamoured of images like this, they’re factual and documentary and I long for emotional content. But I’m in awe of the precision and technical skill it takes to get proportion and composition right, essential groundwork for an artist. I’m not a fan of Damian Hirst’s Shark in Formaldehyde, but I saw a documentary about him which showed some of his early studies, and that man can draw. Same with Tracy Emin. Great artists have this structure in place.
Lands of Light started to make an impression with The Hilltop, Old Cremorne, a small picture painted in 1918. A village street on the rise of a hill, peaceful and curiously empty. I looked at the date and wondered if he was referencing the end of the war years when towns were missing so much of the male population.
There followed pictures of places where Rees holidayed with his second wife Marjory and her family, all pleasant but curiously empty. I began to notice the absence of people in Rees’ paintings. It wasn’t until getting home that I read about the loss of his first wife and child in childbirth and wondered about the impact of that trauma on him.
The exhibition takes a leap from the late sixties to the eighties when Rees and Marjory moved to Tasmania. They stayed with their grown-up son in Sandy Bay and Rees painted wild places he found in the middle of Hobart, leaving out the signs of civilisation. He was in his seventies by then, and developing what the artworld calls a ‘distinctive late style’, when his eyesight began to fail and he relied on memory. Light became the thing, and turning into the second and third rooms is a Turneresque experience.
It struck me that with the absence of people and with his eyesight failing, Rees put his interior vision on the canvas. I found something to relate to there. I do my thinking on the inside and sometimes have trouble getting myself and my thoughts out loud into speech. I can make myself articulate but I have to try hard. I’m best on paper, with my hands over a keyboard or scooting across paper with a pen. It seemed as if Rees was best able to make sense of the world with his mind and brush full of colour and light. His paintings started to speak to me then, loudly and brightly.
The first picture in the third room, Impression of the Derwent, made me want to paint again. It’s watercolour and oil pastel, orange light and yellow sun set on water with blue pastel shapes and shadows. So simply wrought and impressionistic, it’s the kind of art you can imagine creating, but it would take a fine hand and mind to create a piece this decisive, evocative and perfectly balanced and composed.
The paintings in this third room shimmer from the walls. Light becomes his medium, perhaps being what kept him in the world with his vision failing. Blues, yellows, green fields, sun-drenched skies, Wrest Point Tower depicted as a ‘luminous mystical vision’, a sun-glanced yellow and white blur on pink ground against a mauve field of water. The paintings’ names spoke of the light and the time of day - Afterglow, A Morning Vision, A Derwent Dream - and of that interior life.
Rees’ work attracted prizes towards the end of his life and the penultimate painting in the exhibition, Interior, Notre Dam, was painted after a visit to France for an exhibition of his work and a concert at Versailles. It is strikingly different from his other paintings and completed in the year of his death, curiously tunnel like with a central image of bright, busy and colourful scene. I was moved to tears by this point as what I saw was an ending or a portal or a vision of a next life.
Finally I stood in front of the last painting, a grand sweep of mountain, fading pinks and mauve, the lines of the earth and its water traced with a fond hand. That fondness and an appreciation of serenity was what came across.
There is a lot of guff spoken these days about being outside in nature and it’s a pity we all need to be reminded that nature is where we can find solace. All these things are in that final picture and in many of Rees’ others, in his visionary realm of light and wonder.
Lands of Light is on until October and well worth a visit if you’re in Hobart. I visited before I read the catalogue book and relished the chance to stand in front of paintings and let them wash over me. What an antidote to life’s usual stressors that is.
Wonderful. Now I want to go! Are we in a new realm of 50+ women going solo to painting exhibitions to experience a different life, do a tour in someone else’s musings, increase to realms of perception so we become better friends, mothers and lovers? My recent solo journey to Nevada to see the Maynard Dixon exhibition was blissful, and I too relished the architectural space and honey to the shore as well as the show itself. Thank you to the wonderful folk that pull these exhibitions together, and fight for the funding for beautiful spaces to show them in.
As always Fiona, a beautiful and evocative piece of writing. Love your style and how you bring to life all the light you can see. Keep writing!