[5] After formal art training at Brisbane's Central Technical College,[4] he commenced work as a commercial artist in 1917.

Regulars of the Northwood group were Lloyd Rees, Roland Wakelin, George Feather Lawrence and John Santry.

In 1937 Rees became a foundation member of, and exhibited with, Robert Menzies' anti-modernist organisation, the Australian Academy of Art.

[7] Rees first travelled to Europe in the 1920s (to meet with his then fiancée Daphne Mayo) and made sketches, including many of Paris, which were left accidentally on a bus in London at that time.

[8] While some of his works - and indeed his betrothal to Mayo - were lost, his connection with the landscapes of town and country France and Italy was to last a lifetime.

[9] They reveal a capacity to characterize the texture and light of landscapes in these brief media - concerns that are equally evident in his paintings throughout his career.

His works of the last one to two decades in particular showed a preoccupation with the spiritual dimension of the relationship with and portrayal of the landscape, and this became the focus of the final book prepared in cooperation with the author Renée Free: Lloyd Rees: the last twenty years.