Lloyd Rees drawings at Museum of Sydney display perception and precision

Lloyd Rees’s works celebrate the art of drawing and the quest to understand the phenomenal world.

Perception and precision

A thorough or even virtuoso command of technique is not all there is to making good art. At times, as we can observe in music or film — forms in which no one doubts the importance of skill — it can even run the risk of being a distraction from the more important questions of meaning, insight and moral vision. Occasionally a great artist, such as Donatello, seems to be striving against his own facility, and in Chinese art too the value of a certain spontaneous awkwardness could be appreciated.

In the late 19th century, as the art academy reached its pre-modernist apogee, there was an overproduction of highly trained artists with little to say, and this duly led to a modernist reaction against the idea of systematic training. It is almost a cliche, and not always accurate, to repeat that the first generations of modernists nonetheless had the benefit of a thorough formal training, but it is certainly true that the best of them were highly skilled.

Monet’s training was patchy by the standards of his time, but his understanding of tone and colour was extraordinary, allowing him to make beautiful pictures where a less able painter would have produced banality or kitsch. Picasso’s classical training probably has been overstated, but it is true that the works of his analytic cubist period, for example, are the products of great skill and a capacity for highly refined formal and tonal discriminations.

The effect of modernism on art teaching, however, was ultimately disastrous, for it implied that technical training, and even skill, were superfluous. In Australia, we can see artists between the wars trying to find viable formulas for painting, between the fraying academic tradition, the rather bloodless and ultimately neo-academic rehashing of Cezanne or cubism, and pleasantly decorative but lightweight design. And then during the wars, our first real avant-garde, with Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker and others, abandoned technique altogether in the quest for something like authenticity of expression.

These artists did succeed in producing some of the most memorable images of mid-century art in Australia. But the so-called Angry Penguins also made a great deal of remarkably bad art, without direction, rationale or any kind of consistency or quality control. And the consequence that we have seen in the following generations has been a tendency to poor training, low expectations in art schools and hundreds, if not thousands, of graduates unequipped with the competence to embark on any kind of sustained career as an artist.

Many artists have been reticent about acquiring skill or improving their technique, fearful that this might inhibit their creativity. In reality what greater skill does is expose weakness or absence of inspiration, which can be camouflaged to some extent by clumsiness or gimmickry. Art schools and teachers have an interest in promoting the idea that all their students are potential artists, when in reality only a few have the special combination of ability, inspiration, integrity and the capacity for hard work that such a career demands. So schools generally don’t encourage the rigour that would soon reveal the lack of these qualities.

But facing the truth about one’s level of ability is a prerequisite for improvement — a fact that would be blindingly obvious in a field like music — and it is this habitual and even institutionalised depreciation of skill that explains the failure of so many artists to develop. Time and again a young painter shows promise in early work, and then settles into formulaic repetition rather than taking the risk of growing into a better, deeper, more articulate artist. And the result is that the majority of paintings exhibited in commercial galleries are more or less vacuous self-pastiches, timidly clinging to sterile mannerisms that are mistaken for a personal style.

The prejudice against skill and application helps to explain the ambiguous place of Lloyd Rees in the history of Australian art. He doesn’t fit into any standard narrative, and especially not into the modernist myth according to which painting was supposed to pass through successive phases of liberation from servitude to the observation of the phenomenal world until it reached the end of art history with the solipsistic climax of flat abstraction.

In this narrative, all sorts of mediocre and ham-fisted individuals play various roles in the great march forward, while someone such as Rees, and especially with drawings like those exhibited at the Museum of Sydney, seems almost an embarrassment. But as always, the turn of a new century and the rise of a new generation brings with it a revision of the recent past; just as the early 20th century critically reappraised the great Victorians, we are now in a position to reassess the dogmatic history of modernism that held sway a few decades ago.

Rees’s drawings of Sydney Harbour are almost shocking from a modernist perspective, both because they celebrate the art of drawing, which modernist teaching tended to resent as the very heart of classical practice, and because they so dramatically demonstrate that the project of reaching out to understand the phenomenal world is far from over — that the world is, indeed, unfathomable in its mystery and in the inexhaustible challenge and opportunity it presents to an artist.

In the old modernist story, artists are told they don’t need to copy the world any longer but can either express their inner feelings, or depict an occult insight, or simply make flat patterns. But as anyone who has ever tried it should have realised, and as Rees’s views of Sydney make strikingly clear, drawing has nothing to do with copying.

Copying implies the reproduction of like to like, so that one may indeed copy another drawing, for example. At a pinch one can even make a drawn copy of a black-and-white photograph, since that is also a two-dimensional pattern of tones. But a drawing cannot copy the world, which appears as solid, three-dimensional, existing in space and at varying distances from the subject. It is not even one thing, but many, and ultimately even these things dissolve into the complexity of optics and the physiology of perception at one extreme, and the subtleties of moral and affective engagement at the other.

Learning to draw is anything but natural; it is a sophisticated intellectual process — a profound form of brain training, to use a current expression — that involves overcoming many habits of perception that are useful as shortcuts in dealing with our environment but entail discounting or ignoring much of what we actually see. More precisely, it is learning to become conscious of the raw data of perception instead of falling back on what we think we know.

The process, as we can see it in Rees’s drawings, could be described in two phases, one of which is analytic and the other synthetic. The analytic phase consists first of distinguishing the mass of visual data in a view into distinct bodies — trees, buildings, fences, water — with their own volume, spatial dimensions and distance from the viewer, then in turning solid volumes into linear patterns on a flat surface, and finally in abstracting colour from the visual field and reducing all the data of perception to tonal values.

The synthetic phase, as the word implies, brings these elements together. First the different motifs, close and far, have to be assembled into a composition with meaningful formal relations. Partly this is a matter of selecting a point of view and angle of vision, partly it is a matter of choice of emphasis or even omission.

Still more complex is the synthesis of lights and darks, which are surprisingly hard for us to see in their true relationships. One reason for this is the mind naturally, and for good reason, tends to discount shadows as transient phenomena, in order to concentrate on the permanent form and colours of things. In addition, even when we look carefully at an area of light or dark, we adjust to the varying light level and it is hard for the untrained eye to perceive the full intensity of the simultaneous contrast between the two areas.

It is for all of these reasons that Rees’s drawings impart a feeling of almost preternatural perception, as though he were simply seeing much more than we thought possible. His sense of the formal tension between verticals and horizontals, between close and far, or between ­nature and architecture, is as precisely calibrated as musical composition. But still more exhilarating is his feel for the relation of dark and light, ranging from subtlest nuance to a dramatic clash of opposites.

In works like these, the artist is revealing things the eye cannot see unaided — even he cannot see them in the same way in nature, for this is a seeing that is achieved not through an imaginary innocent eye, but through attention, understanding and artifice.

Part of the subtle effect of these drawings comes from the specific combination of materials the artist employs, and which he discovered, as he relates, partly by chance. He was waiting interminably for a bus and thought of passing the time drawing, but found he only had pencils and a fine paper he had been taught to use for ink; pencil drawings were supposed to be done on cartridge paper.

But he discovered the pencil — a soft 2B sharpened to a long fine point — on smooth paper was capable of achieving results of an ­almost ink-like density, while also permitting the softest nuances of shading. And this distinctive combination is what makes possible the seamless continuity of the Sydney drawings, passing through every degree between luminous white and almost jet black.

And this conjunction turned out to be ideal not only for rendering light and dark in buildings, or the relation between tonally defined foregrounds and the weaker contrasts of backgrounds in aerial perspective, but also perfectly adapted to the subtly varied and textured forms of nature, both inorganic geological motifs and organic things like trees.

The giant fig trees profiled against the water are thus among his most memorable subjects. The drawings are physical embodiments of the time and attention that he has brought to bear on these great living forms, in which he seems to discern not only the evidence of a century of long slow growth, but to sense the indiscernible yet untiring energy that continues to manifest itself in their reaching, stretching arms.

Softness and precision, subtlety and decisiveness, combine to imbue these trees with a life that perhaps no other artist has been able to give them. If the whole corpus of drawings has the quality of a study in epistemology, the powerful organic forms of Rees’s figs rise to the level of the metaphysical, if not the spiritual.

Lloyd Rees: Painting with Pencil

Museum of Sydney. Until April 10