Stephen Lees is an established artist based in Leslie Vale, Tasmania. With an acute awareness of art history, including the principles that govern traditional painting techniques, Lees has forged a highly distinctive career which remains peerless within the Tasmanian landscape genre.
Slowly built up through both opaque and transparent layers, Lees’ process honours techniques that defined painting from the 17th and 18th century. Underpinning Lees’ practice is a deep appreciation for how light and form define the aesthetics of the painted image, including how elements can coalesce in a rich and layered surface. Through this careful use of paint, we see an unmistakable admiration for nature, honouring its subtle complexity, receding depth and shifting tones. Distinctive to each composition is a seamless shift between both recognisable and imagined spaces. Here, representation is only a suggestion and quickly fades to reveal something more knowing, where Lees reveals the temperament of the landscape and how it is experienced. As such, Lees helps us to revaluate how beauty is seen within the landscape, using paint to visualise more than just its aesthetic values, but a universal instinct to be connected to the natural world.
Sitting just beneath every meticulously rendered surface are compositions that appear to gently bend and arch, where multiple perspectives seamlessly blend together to reflect the complex nature of vision. Perched on the periphery of abstraction, painted forms appear to gradually dissolve at the edges in a blur of warm light and rich colour, allowing us to feel both the density and evanescence of the landscapes simultaneously.
Even though the defining outlines of the landscape appear indistinct, there is clarity in the precision of Lees’ technique and the knowing intention of the artist’s hand. As such we appreciate Lees’ devotion to pursue this level of exactness within each work, realised only through an absolute poetic application of paint and the perfect balance between both ethereal and physical elements.
Exhibitions
