As Lees explains; “Although I have travelled to many places in Australia, the paintings don’t depict a specific place.” Lees translates his experiences of remote Australia into composite images, sourced from sketches and layered with the residue of memory. Consistently devoid of fauna and human inhabitants, the stillness of his landscapes borders on the mythical, each frame freezing a fragment of time. Lees balances this mythic terrain with the contingencies of locale. The artist’s careful control of the elements recalls the structure of traditional Japanese gardens, in which wilderness and the picturesque are consistently brought into alliance. The aura of contemplation that arises from such a partnership can be found throughout Lees’s career.