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Lloyd Rees Born 1895, Yeronga, Queensland, Australia; died 1988, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia Lloyd Rees is known for his fluid, light-saturated paintings of the Australian landscape in which the human figure and built environment harmonise with trees, cliffs and bodies of water. The artist is also remembered for his expert drafting skills honed over a lifetime of close observation and drawing. The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art holds a beautiful group of Rees’s early Brisbane sketches, including studies of trees, gardens and foliage that hint at humanity’s close connection to our environment. In Moreton Bay Fig at Milton, figure under tree c.1912–17 the twin trunks of a fig reach upwards, supporting a beautifully articulated canopy. A small figure sheltering in the shadows below looks into the distance. In this work, a vast, open space of free-floating potential is perfectly represented by the empty white of the artist’s paper. Rees observed: From quite an early age I was overwhelmed with the fact of endlessness . . . Planetary systems can blow up, but the universe is endless, and our little life is set in the midst of this, and everything in it has a beginning and an end . . . [This] gives to life a sense of mystery that is always with me. 1 1 Renée Free and Lloyd Rees, Lloyd Rees: The Last Twenty Years , Craftsman House, Sydney, 1990, p. 166. Lloyd Rees / Moreton Bay Fig at Milton, figure under tree c.1912–17 119 118 Shared Shared