Lloyd Rees

A brilliant draughtsman, with a love for drawing and painting the beauty and drama of the Australian landscape in all its moods, Rees was particularly attracted to scenes which for him captured the nobility of nature untamed.

Australian facade is among the artist's most significant works - part of a series of paintings, all of which feature the striking monumental form of a towering cliff face. Rendered with bravado and a masterful command of the brush - the landscape of Australian facade is alive with rich impasto and scumbled paint that simultaneously creates a powerful sense of drama as well as a precision of execution in the detailed modelling of the forms of trees and rock.

Rees took the landscapes of Kangaroo Valley and the Blue Mountains of New South Wales as inspiration for this work. He commented: 'The faces of the Blue Mountains come into Australian facade - all the cliffs I ever looked at came in finally in the motif.'

Source: Renee Free, Lloyd Rees, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1972

© Lloyd Rees/Copyright Agency, 2018