Deutscher and Hackett

In the winter of 1976, Lloyd Rees, accompanied by his wife Marjory, made his first and only journey to central Australia. What he encountered there caused a personal revelation, describing it as ‘my most wonderful landscape experience in Australia yet. It’s that elemental feeling of coming up against the immensity and miraculousness [sic] of nature.’1 Basing themselves in Alice Springs, Rees had the benefit of transport via a station wagon belonging to Stanford Pollard, and together they visited Ayers Rock (Uluru), the Macdonnell Ranges (Tjoritja) and the spectacular Olgas (Kata Tjuta) – a group of red, conglomerate domes to the west of Uluru. The Olgas are sacred to the Anangu people and Rees too was deeply affected by their monumental scale, organic form, and sense of deep spiritual significance. Having access to transport meant he could be driven to a particular site, set up in the shade and use the bed of the station wagon as a table for serious drawings as opposed to rapid sketches.
 
The Olgas – the dawning, 1977, was one of a sequence of canvases he painted after his return featuring the domes at differing times of day. While its companions such as Mid morning – the Olgas, 1977, (Australian National University) place as much emphasis on the expansive skies as the rock formations, in the present work the emphasis is the rounded form of the domes themselves. The painting is also a significant example of the new direction Rees had taken with his technique since 1970, where ‘everything his art had previously stood for was upended in these luminous works. Turner and Monet became his guiding lights and the evanescent, not the enduring, became his theme.’2 The Olgas – the dawning exemplifies this with the monolithic forms executed in atmospheric creams and apricot as they slowly reveal themselves in the radiance of the early morning light, whilst patches of green and pink at their base hint at the hardy vegetation which grow between the rocks. In an article on the exhibition containing these works3, Sandra McGrath pronounced Rees to be ‘a new, mystical master at the Centre’, observing further that he had made ‘cathedrals of the rocks’4, a reference to his lifelong fascination with such buildings (see also lot XX). The sensuous, organic curves also recall paintings done of the Olgas by Rees’s great admirer Brett Whiteley in 1970, and again in 1985.
 
Rees’ paintings from the Centre were popular with audiences too, with the Art Gallery of New South Wales purchasing The great rock – dusk (a study of Uluru), while the Newcastle Region Art Gallery chose Twilight, the Olgas, both dated 1977. Also of significance was that The Olgas – the dawning was singled out for comment by the reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald, who described the exhibition as ‘a visionary world of changing light, dissolving forms, soft pastel colours: cherubic pinks and blues, gorse yellow, liquescent green, lit by the pale, incandescent glow of ‘The Dawning’, one of the most sweetly lyrical of the Centre paintings.’5
 
1. Lloyd Rees, cited in Short, S., ‘At 81, Lloyd Rees finds the Centre’, National Times, Sydney, 23 – 25 May 1977. See: Rees, J. and A., Lloyd Rees: a source book, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 1995, p. 34, fn. 98
2. McCaughey, P., Strange country: why Australian art matters, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2014, pp. 309 – 310
3. Lloyd Rees: The Australian Centre and other works, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 29 June – 11 July 1977
4. McGrath, S., ‘A new, mystical master at the Centre’, Australian, 29 June 1977, p. 8
5. Borlase, N., ‘Lloyd Rees – visions of Central Australia’, Sydney Morning Herald, 2 July 1977, p. 16
 
Andrew Gaynor