source: michaelreespaintings

Michael Rees is a self-taught artist. He attended Ipswich School of Art at the age of 17 but left after a year on the foundation course believing this to be the best way to achieve his ambition of becoming an a practicing artist. He relocated to Cornwall in the mid 80s, this was a mixed blessing, for though he could still afford to concentrate full-time on his art, he worked in isolation and without an established dealer/gallery. Another drawback was that his style of painting drew immediate comparisons with known primitive Cornish artist such as Alfred Wallis and Mary Jewels. In fact Rees’s range of working materials and methodology have more in common with artists championed Outsider Art in the early twentieth century, such as Paul Klee and the Dada and surrealist movements. His imagery is based on instinct and compulsion. There are intriguing similarities with the cultural, social and physiological attributes of L’Art Brut (or raw art) as promoted by Jean Dubuffet.
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source: michaelreespaintings

Michael Rees’s work is not easy, he scrapes and scours until an image, perhaps of a head or a figure is at least exhumed from its surroundings, which are seldom unequivocally identified. Are they landscapes or walls or ancient excavated sites? Skulls float from such surfaces, maybe a ghostly dwelling or a tree, maybe a distant skyline. Nothing is too specific and the viewer is free to evoke a personal interpretation.

This is painting which has pleasures, memories, evocations which remain and intrigue long after the initial experience of seeing.

They cannot be easily described or defined. Many have a silence within in which no bird sings. Time is suspended, forms are in touch with the eternity of forever.

But Rees has the awareness of his contemporary situation, much of the work is concerned with ‘modern man’. They exist with slightly awkward limbs, on printed paper lists of no great significance and of no material value, in frames whose rigid shapes, they are often uncomfortable.

They are modern works of modern man, often agitated, slightly ill at ease. The works are about the human condition, our place, our contemporary fears and joys, our very existence.

John Maltby