William Tillyer (born 25 September 1938) is a British artist working within painting, watercolour and the printmaking tradition. His approach is constantly evolving; redefining and reinterpreting classic subject matter, such as landscapes, still lifes and portraits, in methods that challenge historical traditions and vary between bodies of work. Since the 1950s, Tillyer has exhibited internationally, and his work can be found in the collections of major institutions including the Arts Council of Great Britain, the Brooklyn Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), Tate Britain and the Victoria and Albert Museum. There are at least 15 works by Tillyer in the Tate collection, including High Force (1974).
Early life and education
Born in Middlesbrough, Tillyer studied painting at the Middlesbrough College of Art from 1956 to 1959 before moving to London in the 1960s to study at the Slade School of Art, with painting as his main subject and printmaking as his subsidiary. There, he encountered William Coldstream and Anthony Gross, among others.
In 1959, Tillyer had two of his paintings – Painting and Sea, Clouds and Beach (both 1958) – accepted for the 'Young Contemporaries' exhibition, the tenth in a series of annual shows arranged to make public the best work done by students in England's art schools. The paintings were selected that year by Victor Pasmore, Terry Frost, Andrew Forge, Ceri Richards and William Turnbull.
Following his time at the Slade, Tillyer took up a French Government Scholarship to study gravure under Stanley William Hayter, at Atelier 17 in Paris.
thumb|Mrs Lumsden's, 1971
Encouraged by Tillyer's showing at the Arnolfini Gallery, Jacobson published a further four etchings, the Dry Lake suite. In 1971, 26 of his etchings were shown in the new Print Gallery within the Arts Council's Serpentine Gallery in London. Henceforth, with Jacobson marketing them, Tillyer's prints were seen and appreciated more widely. Other artists responded to them with enthusiasm, notably David Hockney, Sam Francis, Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha and Andy Warhol. These dualities are certainly there, and patent once we look for them. But the way he explores them makes it dangerous to attribute standard qualities to them: nothing is ever quite what it seems. Certainly they are "organic" and "geometric": these adjectives are clear enough. "Gestural", however, implies that the forms are not planned and thought-out, which axiomatically they are. Tillyer deploys pictorial rhetoric masterfully, using forms that look spontaneous and emotive with the same deliberation as geometric forms. Tillyer observes nature, but he also observes mankind's work. The world of design is as much within his remit as the world of nature, and "design" here includes aspects of modern and old-master art that could well be labelled "ideal". His process is constructive as well as deconstructive. In paintings such as Square Form (1990), we see him assembling forms and marks in a considered way. The work's form betrays the artist's process, which involves clear thought before and during its creation. The canvas is square and white. In its lower left corner is a black square, its sides uneven, a blue parallelogram apparently rising from either behind or above it, the bottom edge of which seems to fade away. All the other forms are gestural, and yet their clear, crisp outlines would appear to belie the artist's ostensibly spontaneous mark-making. Organic yet geometric; gestural yet rational.
Tillyer's presentation of elements which speak of nature together with elements that speak of human manufacture and human logic has been in his art from the first: two sorts of reality, linked because nature too adheres to logical processes and by the fact that we live in an environment made up of both. His habit of interrupting our reception of his images was born out of his desire to stop us mistaking art's artificial procedures and results as reality—that is to say, as a persuasive representation of something real. Here we get to the point of the series. The title, Living in Arcadia refers to two pictures by the classical French Baroque painter Nicolas Poussin. Their original titles are uncertain now. They are often labeled Et in Arcadia ego (1627/1637–38), in itself an ambiguous phrase, that is perhaps best translated: "I too lived in Arcadia". In both versions, shepherds examine a sarcophagus. The implication is that they have just discovered the stone monument and, having read its portentous epitaph, are pictured in the process of comprehending its significance. Even in Arcadia, that idyllic pastoral land associated with perfect well-being, death rules. Poussin's humans and the sarcophagus make for an unambiguous contrast: they and their natural environment live, while it speaks of death. Tillyer's series engages broadly with the same idea. His coloured forms may refer to nature, but he shows us quite clearly that they are merely acrylic (and therefore artificial) pigments, applied to panel – not natural and not alive – while the nominal "square form" is perhaps his equivalent to Poussin's man-made tomb.
Fearful Symmetries
When Tillyer's Fearful Symmetries series was shown at the Bernard Jacobson Gallery in 1993, the catalogue reprinted an article Martin Gaylord had written a few weeks earlier. Gayford visited Tillyer in Yorkshire, and discussed with him his ideas about nature and landscape and his thoughts concerning watercolour painting, his own and his most important predecessors', Alexander and John Robert Cozens, J. M. W. Turner, John Sell Cotman etc. The first months of 1993 saw a large exhibition of 'The Great Age of British Watercolours' at the Royal Academy, and it made good sense to get Tillyer's response to this on the way to focusing on his own use of the medium. Tillyer declared his interest in the founders of this 'great age', and distanced himself from the elaborately worked watercolours of the mid-Victorians, done, as he said, to compete with oil paintings but essentially unable to. "Each medium has its own nature. It's what you're saying with the medium that's important."
In 2013 Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art in Middlesbrough MIMA held the first major retrospective exhibition of Tillyer's work since 1996.
In late 2017, Bernard Jacobson announced in the Art Newspaper that he would be filling most of his 2018 exhibition schedule with shows dedicated to Tillyer, launching "five separate exhibitions incorporating new and historic works by the Middlesbrough-born artist." Jacobson, who has been Tillyer's dealer since 1969, stated: "He was an unknown then, and I’ve stayed loyal to him since. I consider him the heir to Constable through Cézanne and Matisse. He is an intensely private man who is completely outside the system, and I’m keen to set the record straight."