14 Facts About Lloyd Rees

Lloyd Rees's oeuvre is dominated by sketches and paintings, in which the most frequent subject is the built environment in the landscape.

Lloyd Rees was born in Brisbane, Queensland, the seventh of eight children of Owen Lloyd Rees and his wife Angele Burguez, who was half Mauritian, half Cornish.

Lloyd Rees attended Ironside State School Ironside State School and Ithaca Creek State School in Brisbane's inner west.

In 1937 Lloyd Rees became a foundation member of, and exhibited with, Robert Menzies' anti-modernist organisation, the Australian Academy of Art.

The window was splashed with paint because Lloyd Rees would stand in front of his wet painting holding half a gallon of turps in one hand and put his other hand into the turps and throw it over the painting.

Lloyd Rees first travelled to Europe in the 1920s and made sketches, including many of Paris, which were left accidentally on a bus in London at that time.

Lloyd Rees claimed that one of the benefits of his failing eyesight in his old age was that he could look directly at the sun.

Lloyd Rees was engaged to sculptor Daphne Mayo, but it was broken off in 1925.

In 1927 Dulcie died in childbirth and Lloyd Rees married again, in 1931, to Marjory Pollard, mother to his son Alan.

Lloyd Rees' wife died on 14 April 1988 and he died on 2 December of the same year.

Lloyd Rees won the Commonwealth Jubilee Art Prize in 1957 and in 1971 he won the John McCaughey Memorial Art Prize and the International Cooperation Art Award.

Lloyd Rees was appointed a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George in 1978 and Australia's highest civilian honour, Companion of the Order of Australia in 1985.

Lloyd Rees was awarded the Medaille de la Ville de Paris in 1987 in honour of his artistic achievements.

For forty years, from 1946 to 1986, Lloyd Rees taught art with Sydney University's Faculty of Architecture and in 1988 received the Sydney University Union Medal for his contributions to art and the University.