About ELIZABETH REES

Elizabeth Rees belongs to a reasonably large group of New Zealand artists, those who are serious, committed, capable and professional. Rees has been solely a painter for 20 years; she exhibits regularly, and makes a living through the sale of her work. She has explored her themes assiduously, challenging herself and her audience along the way, and her work is identifiably hers. Like other members of this group, she has received little critical coverage, and is as likely to be equally ignored by national survey shows as she is by the curators du jour. 

It is an attitude that she returns in kind. In an art world that revolves around gossip, networking and favours, Rees is a loner. She has kept to her own path, without relying on the encouragement of colleagues or a peer group, and her success is primarily due to her own self-belief. 

Rees is a painter of mystery. Her work, across all its themes, suggests a moment caught and made solid with oil paint. Or at least semi-solid. Her painterly technique, in which she obfuscates the scene that she presents, deems everything unstable. Human flesh, rock, water and air are made soft and tentative; if she is a painter of faith, that too is made unreliable. She questions what she sees, and how she sees it. Perception is all we have, yet it is a slippery friend.

This is what resonates with her audience – the conclusions Rees draws are not unique to her. She does not impose her conclusions, but draws viewers in to make their own. As T.J. McNamara wrote in a review of her 2003 show at Auckland’s Milford Galleries: “Everybody will see these paintings in a different way, and that is their strength.” 

In a post-digital art world full of the didactic and the dogmatic, there is something reassuringly human and slightly off-kilter about the work of Elizabeth Rees. Her painted worlds offer the possibility that it is acceptable to vacillate before a momentous decision. It is reasonable to question what you see before you. The road you are on may not be the right one, but there is always a new vista around the next corner. That impending sky may be an approaching storm, or just a harmless bank of cloud. Up ahead lies the future.

Up ahead lies hope.

By: Don Abbott