Rhys Lee: eerie figures, fast paint and a colourist's eye

Rhys Lee is a painter whose people never quite settle into being people. A cowboy's face drifts into a mask, a hand grows too long, a hat sits on a head that might belong to a dog. The paint is quick and loose, the colour is often lovely, and the mood sits somewhere between a children's book and a ghost story. If you have only seen his work on a screen, the first thing to know is that it is physical: thick, scraped, dragged paint that rewards a close look before you step back to take in the figure.

From graffiti to the canvas

Lee was born in Brisbane in 1975. He studied at the Queensland College of Art at Griffith University, finishing a Bachelor of Visual Arts in graphic design in the late 1990s, though by his own account his attention at the time was on graffiti and painting rather than layout and type. That street background matters. It shows in the confidence of his line, in his willingness to work big and fast, and in a habit of treating a wall as just another surface.

In 1999 he moved to Melbourne, wanting to be closer to the art and culture he felt he was missing in Brisbane, and he has exhibited regularly since then. Later he moved his studio out of the city to country Victoria, south-west of Melbourne.

What the paintings look like

His main materials are oil and acrylic on canvas, with pastel and charcoal on paper for drawings. The subjects come back again and again, which makes them easier to read once you know them: stylised, slightly grotesque figures, cowboys, circus outcasts, animals that behave like people and people who look half skeleton. Hands and hats turn up so often that it looks deliberate, although Lee has said the repetition arrived by chance.

The Art Gallery of New South Wales describes him as a noted colourist, and that is the right place to start. The figures are often built from a few broad passages of colour, soft pinks, chalky blues, acid yellows, laid down in wide strokes and then cut into with darker lines. The faces are rarely finished in the academic sense. Two dabs might be eyes, a scrape might be a mouth, and the colour does the rest of the work. A critic quoted by the gallery compared the effect to a ghost story told by the fire, which captures the slightly unsettling warmth of the best of them.

Speed is part of the method. Writing about a 2017 exhibition of ten paintings and one hundred drawings, The Design Files reported that Lee works fast and makes a great deal of work. "I work quickly, making a lot of work so the evolution gets a little sped up sometimes," he told the magazine. The paintings in that show took about two years in his home studio; the drawings, in pastel and charcoal, were started that January and some were made on the road in New York and Germany. The titles were as plain as a stock list, Painting 1 to 10 and Drawing 1 to 100, which tells you something: he would rather you looked than read.

Walls and public projects

Because of where he started, Lee has never treated the canvas as the only place for paint. The Art Gallery of New South Wales lists among his career highlights painting the interior walls of the RMIT University Gallery in Melbourne in 2004, and a large interior wall at the Vargas Museum at the University of the Philippines in 2010. The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne lists him among the artists of its program Who's Afraid of Public Space?, in an offsite project titled TO THE STREET with James MacSporran.

He has also taken charge of his own record. In 2009 he self-published a 300-page monograph, simply titled Rhys Lee, covering ten years of work. In 2005 his work featured on the cover of Australian Art Collector magazine.

The Archibald self-portrait

Lee was a finalist in the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize in 2009, and in 2012 he was hung in the Archibald Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales for the first time. His entry, Self-portrait with shiny cardboard armour, is an oil on canvas 168 by 112 centimetres. In his statement he linked it to Ned Kelly, whom his father's family research connects to him, and joked that the bushranger beard and haircut had come back into fashion. The cardboard, he wrote, was a kind of armour artists hide behind. He painted it using a mirror and a cardboard prop, which is about as close to a studio confession as a self-portrait gets.

It is a useful painting for anyone new to his work, because it shows the method under pressure. A self-portrait asks for likeness; Lee gives you a believable presence and a costume instead, and lets the paint stay rough.

How to look at a Rhys Lee

His paintings work at two distances, and it helps to give each its turn. Here is a ten-minute routine I use with figurative paintings like these, whether on a museum wall or at a prize show.

1. Stand back three or four metres for the first minute. Find the figure and the main colour chords. Ask what the mood is before you ask what the subject is.
2. Walk in to arm's length. Follow one stroke from start to finish. Where did the brush load up, where did it run dry, where was it scraped back?
3. Find the face, then cover it with your hand (from a polite distance). Notice how much of the character survives in the posture, the hat and the hands alone.
4. Look at the edges of the canvas. In loose paintings the corners often show the first layers, and you can see how the colour was built.
5. Step back again and check whether the figure now reads as funny, sad or slightly threatening. With Lee it can be all three at once.

Drawings deserve the same slowness. Pastel and charcoal on paper are fragile and immediate, and in a large group of them you can watch an idea change from one sheet to the next. If you are thinking about living with one, ask about framing with a spacer so the glazing does not touch the pastel surface; the room on framing and care covers why.

Reading the strangeness

New viewers sometimes take the distortions as a joke at the figure's expense. They read better as sympathy. Lee's outcasts and half-animal characters are rarely mocked; they are dressed up, posed and given good colour. The grotesque in his work is closer to a fairy tale than a cartoon, a way of making familiar feelings (shyness, bravado, loneliness) visible on a body.

It is also worth keeping his first training in mind. Graphic design teaches economy: what is the fewest number of marks that will carry a message? Many of his faces are a lesson in exactly that, and once you notice it you start to see how carefully placed the "careless" strokes are.

A short close

Rhys Lee is a good painter to meet early if you are learning to look at contemporary figuration, because he shows how much character can live in loose paint and strong colour. Compare his speed with the patient layering in the note on Guy Maestri, or with the long calligraphic line in the essay on John Olsen, and you will start to see how differently Australian painters build a figure or a place. More artist notes are collected on the painters page.