WILLIAM TILLYER
William Tillyer (born 1938) lives and works in North Yorkshire, and despite a developed international career he remains a hermetic figure who for many years has pursued his highly individualistic approach to modern art making in his own Giverny-like setting. Using a variety of media, including paint, watercolour, printing, collage and assemblage, Tillyer works in sets and sequences. Each of these has its own character and internal development, yet his entire oeuvre demonstrates a remarkable consistency and continuity.
Tillyer entered onto the British art scene in the late 1950s, and remained independent of the schools of painters that emerged around the same time. He has been inspired by the Russian Constructivists, particularly Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzsky, whose geometrical elements he combines with the gestural freehand forms found in Abstract Expressionism.
Tillyer claims his interest centres on ‘the tension between the Artificial and the Real’. He seeks to demonstrate the artificiality of art, even when it refers to ‘real’ landscape, while simultaneously acknowledging the material ‘reality’ of the art object. His work is first and foremost art about art, but it is also art about nature. In this sense, it is post-conceptual. Sweeping organic forms and bold colours which allude to the sky, clouds, earth, trees or wheat fields, are juxtaposed with sharp contours and darker, more solid colours, which suggest man-made objects. In the same tradition as Gainsborough, Constable and Turner, Tillyer is a British landscape painter who is deeply engaged with his native Yorkshire.
An important aspect of Tillyer’s work is the interplay between two- and three-dimensional space. He breaks through the otherwise emphatically flat picture plane in a variety of ways, by introducing holes or protrusions, and through the use of collage and thick brushwork. In other works he creates sculptural arrangements of flat metal mesh and card. These experiments examine the notions of perspective and pictorial relief, and play with illusions of light and space. The lattice motif evident in almost all of Tillyer’s work carries mechanical and machine-made connotations that contrast with the softer organic elements. It is his visual trademark, which while being a tool that he uses to explore variations in form and colour, provides a consistent vocabulary throughout his artistic development.
Tillyer’s diverse and multi-layered watercolours which focus intensely on subjects such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘Fallingwater’, the Grand European Tour, Monument Valley, Utah and the English landscape are consistent with his approach in other media. These stunning works consist of dried puddles, rivulets and shifting colour and light that often correspond to elements in nature and in other places are entirely abstract.