This document discusses drawing techniques used by Australian artist Lloyd Rees. It describes how Rees would map landscapes by selecting, exaggerating, and manipulating objects like roads, fences, and rock textures. Rees used techniques like perspective, tonal massing, overlapping screens, and expressive mark making to convey a sense of three-dimensional space and depth on a two-dimensional surface. Specifically, he would employ overlapping "screens" of forms and tonal barriers and passages to guide the viewer's eye through the illusory landscape. Later in his career, Rees relied more on his drawing instincts and sense of space, making confident, bold marks with graphite that expressed the landscape. The workshop was developed to honor Rees

1. Drawing Workshop
inspired by Lloyd Rees

2. Rock Formation Waverton – 1934

3. “The drawings were by no means naturalistic in the
sense of simply selecting a subject and drawing, for
there were things to be brought in and left out. They
were highly worked and I had an intense interest in the
manipulation of them”. Lloyd Rees

4. Drawing devices that Lloyd Rees used include:
• Perspective
• mapping the contours of the landscape
• use of overlapping screens
• tonal massing, barriers and passages
• expressive manipulation of media

5. Mapping the landscape
Rees used roads, fences, meandering waterways, textures
of rock surfaces etcetera to traverse the landscape and
map out its contours.
He selected, exaggerated, manipulated, moved around,
and invented these objects to enable him to define form
and create the illusion of three dimensions.
They provide visual clues or evidence of spatial
relationships and deliver the viewer into the illusory space
of drawing.

6. How do we express the illusion of form
on a two dimensional surface?
Objects in the landscape like hills, rivers, clouds and
buildings are three dimensional forms within a spatial
relationship.
When we attempt to draw or paint them we are working
with illusion - we are working on a two dimensional
surface called the picture plane and trying to convey a
sense of three dimensions.
How do we communicate this sense of space, distance,
depth, weight, solidity, gravity and atmosphere on a flat
surface?

7. Drawing for etching North Western Tasmania 1977

8. Mount Wellington 1973

9. Screens
Screens are definable, mostly overlapping steps into the
landscape that indicate spatial relationships, rather like the
old fashioned screens in the shallow space of a theatre stage.
Rees used these screens to step the viewer's eye through the
illusory space of he landscape.
He emphasised the overlapping of the screens through the
use of tonal barriers and softened their relationships with
tonal passages to allow the eye to pass over and beyond
them.
He used tonal massing to tonally group areas containing
smaller screens.

10. Lloyd Rees - Bathurst -1934

11. Bathurst -1934 St Stephens, 1914

12. Mountains of Delphi 1966

13. Werri, Saddleback

14. Expressive manipulation of media
‘Touch’ – ‘Mark Making’
In his later work Rees used these academic drawing
devices in a less self-conscious way as if he had
absorbed and then forgotten them.
His confidence allowed him to rely more on his drawing
instincts and and innate sense of illusory space.
He relied more on ‘touch’ and the powerfully expressive
language of his soft graphite media.
His mark making was confident, bold and expressive.

16. South Coast Beach

17. South Coast Beach

19. Gorge Launceston

26. This drawing workshop was developed to acknowledge Lloyd Rees in a
weekend dedicated to the memory of Lloyd Rees at Gerringong, NSW
Howard H Jones