Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

'THE BOY ARTIST' Lloyd Rees S t Brigid's, Red Hill M ichael Beckmann Facing page Lloyd Rees Exterior, St Brigid's Church, Red Hill 1916 Pen and ink and watercolour wash over pencil on wove paper 23.1x14.1 cm Gift of John Brackenreg 1965 Queensland A rt Gallery Above Portrait of Lloyd Rees in the 1920s. Photograph courtesy Jan and Alan Rees Right Lloyd Rees Self portrait c.1920 Pencil on paper 19.8 X 18cm Gift of Alan and Jan Rees through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 1998 T ■ loyd Rees was commissioned to draw St Brigid's Church, Red Hill, Mu, ir# Brisbane, in 1916when he briefly occupied the stratum between art and architectural drawing. At 21 years of age he possessed neither the mechanistic precision of an architectural draughtsman nor the unique vision of a mature artist. Neither attribute was required to fulfil the commission. Rees's youthful talent for meticulous renderings of buildings brought him regular requests to draw the architectural icons of early Brisbane. The painstaking detail in which he recorded the buildings was a direct correlative with his obsession for them — an obsession that was shared, in the case of St Brigid's, by Father McCarthy, the parish priest overseeing the new church and Rees's commission. Such was Father McCarthy's interest in the drawings that he neglected his priestly duties to sit alongside Rees as he sketched.1 Rees drew St Brigid's with the earnest intensity of a young portrait artist enamoured with his stocky model. The finished drawings declare his agnostic infatuation with ecclesiastical architecture. Illuminating the massive form of the church with Brisbane's brilliant sunlight, Rees bleached out any thought of an ethereal radiance. The subject of the drawings was not metaphysical, it was physical. The soaring height and prominent position of St Brigid's make it a landmark in Brisbane. Situated high on the crest of Red Hill, it towers above the surrounding workers' cottages in a district originally considered too steep for affluent houses — projecting the authority of the Roman Catholic Church over a once predominantly poor-Irish neighbourhood The dramatic Gothic Revival style of the church was chosen by a building committee from postcards of various buildings collected by the prominent Queensland architect Robin Dods on his travels overseas. The committee selected the fourteenth-century fortress cathedral at Albi in France as the prototype for Dods's design.2 Robin Dods was one of a series of architects who had, some years earlier, rejected Rees's application for an apprenticeship on account of his poor mathematical ability. Fatefully, however, Dods expressed an interest in the 15-year- old's drawings, which later helped Rees to attain important commissions. Perhaps Dods's interest sprang from an artistic inclination, as he occasionally displayed architectural drawings in local art exhibitions. Previously favoured by the Brisbane Diocese of the Church of England, the Presbyterian Dods supervised the start of construction of the Anglican St John's Cathedral, an impressive example of Gothic stone vaulting which made a lasting impression on the young Rees.3 Rees was inspired to complete a series of drawings of the building which he, possibly unwittingly, presented to Dods with his application. The buildings that filled Rees's imagination and dominated the subject matter of his early drawings were commonly the most visible and tangible form of culture and aesthetic sensibility available to him. Brisbane provided Rees with a limited 116 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965