William Tillyer
William Tillyer 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, Tate Britain and the Victoria and Albert Museum. There are at least 15 works by Tillyer in the Tate collection, including High Force.
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 – 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. Here, Tillyer had what he describes as "the archetypal artist's studio" at rooftop level in the American Pavilion of the Cité Universitaire, where he lived and worked when not in Hayter's studio. There he found a dense population of students, and a properly equipped print workshop. The pressure, though, was such that he spent much of his time in his room, making prints without a press. In 1963 he returned to England, and lived first in Notting Hill, in something close to abject poverty, and then in Middlesbrough.
By the later 1960s Tillyer was experimenting with constructed works with a conceptual basis, working on ideas of the grid and of the implied performative nature of hardware such as hinges and handles, he made works including Fifteen Drawer Pulls, 1966.
Printmaking
Tillyer began experimenting with printmaking in 1958, while a student at the Slade, and it was as a printmaker that he made his first reputation. He won international acclaim at the Second International Print Biennale in Kraków in 1968, and, the following year, found the support of Bernard Jacobson, who has been his dealer ever since. They met after Tillyer paid a visit to Jacobson, one of the leading print dealers and publishers in the country, in his office on Mount Street, Mayfair armed with a selection of his newest prints. Jacobson was enthusiastic and selected two for immediate publication, Mrs Lumsden's and The Large Birdhouse.The late 1960s saw a sudden explosion in the making and marketing of prints in Britain and generally in the Western world. International print exhibitions became regular events, some of them awarding major prizes. There was a new interest in prints as an art form, one that attracted a growing class of art-interested people not wealthy enough to collect unique paintings and sculpture. Finely edited and packaged suites and portfolios of prints, especially those produced by young and rising artists, were seen as attractive investments.
Tillyer's first major exhibition was held at Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol in 1970 and consisted of 33 etchings, three of which were immediately purchased by the British Council for its enterprising collection. With these prints, Tillyer used a variety of techniques, from etching to five tone screenprinting, to create lattices which through their gradation of tone depict what Pat Gilmour described as "a cool and unpeopled world...in which to reflect the surrounding flux of nature."
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. From 1972 onwards, Tillyer's work has been shown regularly in group and solo exhibitions around the world.
During 1975–76, while participating in an artist's a residency at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, Tillyer began to use an idiosyncratic tall format for prints produced by diverse processes. He claimed at the time that the format echoed the tall window of his campus studio, and was confirmed for him by Chinese scroll paintings he saw in the university's gallery. Jacobson had asked him to contribute an image to a portfolio of new prints to be published in 1976 in celebration of the bicentenary of John Constable's birth; the other artists contributing included David Hockney, Robyn Denny and Richard Smith. Tillyer used this unfamiliar, anti-landscape format for an etching done in honour of Constable, For John Constable: The Cape, New England; it enabled him to keep his distance from the artist he was paying respect to. He used a large proportion of aquatint, apparently brushed on like watercolour. Evening light catches on clouds that fill the vertical slice of sky; at the bottom can be seen the sails of the Hampstead windmill that appears in certain Constable pictures. Its presence determines the scale of the whole, and presents a contrast between that one man-made detail, at the foot of the tall print, and the soft, delicate, but somewhat threatening swathes of lilac that almost fill the rest.
The Providence Prints is a suite of seven woodcuts and linocuts, using the same format but wholly different in technique, expression and subject. Exceptionally, Tillyer here allowed himself a variety of genres within a suite: landscape, still like, the human figure. To each of the seven prints the Tillyer lattice makes major contributions, including in the figure images, where three or four lattices, cut with differing strengths and at varying scales, present floor, screen, background and the figures themselves. These may be echoes of Matisse's early figures, more obviously in the instance of the reclining figure, redolent as it is of the Blue Nude of 1907. The other, a standing figure, reflected in a mirror, her elbows raised as her hands meet behind her head, is likewise reminiscent of leftmost figure in Matisse's Le Bonheur de Vivre of 1905–06, a stock pose adapted from nineteenth-century academic painting.
Mesh works
The mid-1970s were a busy exhibiting period for Tillyer, but those years also show him reconstructing his professional image. Without playing down his prominence as a printmaker, he was eager to bring painting to the fore as his principal medium and vehicle of artistic expression. There followed a drastic reworking of the methods he had been using, and the images resulting from them, with Tillyer combining the canvas with a steel mesh ground, a bold decision without art historical precedent. In Blue Vase and Arrangement, wire mesh occupies the centre and supplies the frame. The middle is occupied by the vase, which in turn is surrounded by colourful strokes and blotches: the nominal "arrangement" of flowers. These red, orange and green palimpsests burst forth from a dark, canvas ground, the jouissance of the flowers' colour being matched by the artist's self-consciously incongruous and witty identification of steel mesh with a ceramic vase.There followed a second group of mesh paintings, which do away with the canvas altogether, made in 1979–80. Tillyer calls them the Mesh Works. Among the larger ones is Study for the House at Fontenay-aux-Roses by Way of the Admiral's House, which was painted on an orthogonally positioned mesh of squares, collaged with bits of board front and back. There is thick paint on the mesh and thick paint on the boards, and these too come in primarily vertical and horizontal units. The white vertical form in the centre is not, this time, a vase, but a glimpse of a house amid foliage; to the left is a tall mottled green horizontal brushstroke, a poplar tree. The upper register, laden with bits of chipped wood panel assumes the form of a clear blue sky, and generally the scene is bathed in sunshine. A baroque gilt frame is hinted at on the right.
Tillyer would seem in this "study" to have tested how much and how little information would serve to convey his theme. He has expressed his interest in "the tension between the artificial and the real". Tillyer makes images—often, though not exclusively—with subjects derived from the natural world, which, through varying degrees of transformation, are turned into something essentially different: pictorially and materially. He tests, and ultimately expands, the limits of how far he is able to distance the artificial depiction from its real-world referent, without losing the reference itself, the point of this enterprise being to investigate and to demonstrate ever more fully the axiomatic contrivance and conceit implicit in the creation of all art.