Canadian painter Geoff Rees (1930–2018) was a pivotal figure in Vancouver’s postwar art scene, a teacher, traveller, and modernist whose lyrical abstractions bridged intellect and intuition. Over the course of five decades, he shaped the direction of Western Canadian painting, influencing generations of artists through both his practice and his teaching at the Vancouver School of Art, later Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

Born in Nelson, British Columbia, Rees was the son of an English father and Australian mother who had each migrated to Canada at the turn of the century. Though touched by his father’s English sensibility and his early travels abroad, Rees’s identity was profoundly Canadian, rooted in a country where multiculturalism and open exchange were beginning to define a new cultural language.

After graduating from the Vancouver School of Art in 1952, Rees became fascinated by the discipline and restraint of Japanese woodblock prints, whose casual precision of mark and color profoundly shaped his painterly vocabulary. These early influences informed a lifelong pursuit of balance between control and spontaneity—works in which nature was abstracted and distilled into color, gesture, and rhythm. His mentor Jack Shadbolt encouraged in him the belief that “the experience of the painting is within the painting,” teaching Rees to treat the act of making as a meditative search for meaning.

Soon after graduation, Rees set out by motor across Europe and Asia, a journey that carried him through Rajasthan and later to New Guinea, North Africa, Sri Lanka, and India. These travels deepened his sensitivity to non-Western systems of seeing, to pattern, symbolism, and the spiritual weight of form. The experience would echo throughout his work: a harmony between structure and transcendence, the tangible and the ineffable.

uring his teaching career, Rees maintained a rigorous studio practice. He was represented by Buschlen Mowatt Gallery until its closure in 1990, exhibiting regularly across Western Canada and abroad. His 1991 solo exhibition Tribe of One and his 1994 show with Doug Haynes and Otto Rogers revealed the full breadth of his abstract language: radiant color fields and gestural marks suspended in a kind of poised animation, alive yet still. Concurrently, he produced a series of large-scale geometric wooden sculptures—modular forms designed to be dismantled and reassembled, balancing robustness with fragility and echoing the compositional logic of his paintings

Jack Shadbolt on Geoff Rees

“GEOFF REES is a quester—one of those rare and gentle temperaments in search of truth beyond the catchiness of the obvious. There is no dull mind or academic intent in the ancient question, What am I, whatever art being is, only that seeking.

His relation to art manifests this. There is only the process of art, the intimations of mystery in what is evoked by the way forms move together to find their accord, the “sea changes” they go through to accommodate. His paintings seem to be seeking a configuration. His forms seem to have passed through the spirit and emerge cleansed and illumined by an inner light. His paintings are calm, awaiting resolution, inviting the viewer to share with him a reflection on the nature of just being.

In his search his pores are wide open. He responds to music, poetry, literature, and mythology, and above all to human warmth, yet, under his gentleness, there is discipline, and a clear intelligence which rejects the facile or merely picturesque on external accident. His paintings are necessarily hard because he needs to be lost in them and abstract because he deals with states of realization, and his definition of form is loose because he does not court finalities. His movement is floating rather than structurally dynamic because he’s not egocentric. His colour is radiant rather than assertive, and his drawing line continuous in their silvery abundance. Only inherently has he recognized the temporal rhythm of creativity that frees form from compression as captured in both notebook studies and prodigious canvases.

To help keep his inner equipoise, and as a relief from the analysis demanded by teaching, he has travelled to cultures where non-rational apprehension of the world is supreme. After graduating from the Vancouver School of Art, he set out on a motor trip across Europe and Asia as far as Rajasthan and in recent years has spent time in New Guinea, Sri Lanka, and other places.

Although his mind and sympathetic personality have made him a good teacher of the art spirit, he is primarily a perpetual student. It is a pleasure to see him finally exhibiting.”

— Jack Shadbolt, January 23, 1990