To understand the world of Christopher Lees, is to understand the physicality and the majesty of the Australian landscape.

Lees possesses the consummate skill of both the artist, and the craftsman. He has made his bravura celebration of the Southern Continent, an expression of identity, and place. A place we all spiritually associate with but may not necessarily know. His oil paintings are an invitation for us to engage in a journey of exploration. Lees is the supreme and undisputed ruler of his domain because each part of it is a construct brought to life, through the alchemy of his own imagination.  

 A linguist, a communicator writ large, the artist delivers us a new interpretation of the ‘Great Southern Land’. An ancient and eroded land. A land which, through his lens, is invested with new life. And that life is rejuvenated by the intensity of Lees’s power of observation via its essential elements – water, land, vegetation, and light. He is a master of atmospherics, a conjurer of the ineffable. Lees has produced his own personal visual language – something rare in contemporary Australian art. A visual language which is an inheritance, a talisman, a continuum of discovery.

From his bat-cave, (hideout) Lees is surrounded by the enigmatic granite boulders of the Northeast Victorian High Country. The contour line marked out by steep hills clothed in forest, and those pin pricks of land that cannot be accessed. It’s always the remote, the inaccessible, drawing us closer. These are the Strathbogie Ranges. The hills beyond Eildon.  Those hills that are folded and clothed in forest rock, ravine and rill. The hills that hide the tracery of those who traversed tor slopes aeons ago, and those rock sentinels, imperious, cloaking the tor slopes. The hills that gave refuge to the Ned Kelly gang, who thought the valleys may be pastureland, bucolic settings for well-to-do farmers and grazing. The hills create that demarcation line, suggesting this is the edge of the civilised world. Beyond the remoteness of the Great Divide, and the entropy of land that cannot be walked. Of thick undergrowth, messmate and ash forest. Of ravines blanketed in blackwood, red box and wattle. The incandescent haze of water vapour, of early morning and the song of the lyrebird, the cockatoo and the kookaburra.

Lees’s work is currently represented in numerous significant private and corporate collections in Australia, Asia, U.S.A, Europe and the U.K.

Born 1969, Victoria