William Tillyer
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Exceptionally, Tillyer here allowed himself a variety of genres within a suite: landscape (waterfall), still like (the cylindrical vase with flowers), the human figure (two images of a nude posed indoors against a screen and a mirror).
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.
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.
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.
[citation needed] 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 also stresses how J. M. W. Turner and others enlarged the effects achieved in it by "roughing and scraping the surface of the paper" and other such means, while Ruskin recommended the admixture of white to make watercolour opaque.
Girtin, before Ruskin weighed in, had "sought to 'purify' the practice of watercolour" and made positive use of the whiteness of his chosen paper, together with delicate and also denser washes of colour.
For, when used in a way which preserved the particular qualities of the medium (even at the price of loss of immediate resemblance to the appearance of things) watercolour painting seemed to come closest to embodying the fragility, and elusive spontaneity, of our perceptions of nature itself.
"[2] Thus Tillyer appeared to be extending the researches of Ivon Hitchens and of Patrick Heron, Peter Lanyon and others associated with St Ives, fusing their response to nature, inherited from Romanticism, with the modern call for independent, often abstract image-making, guided by the doctrine of 'Truth to Materials'.
Here Fuller makes good use of a quotation from Ruskin: "The English tradition of landscape, culminating in Turner, is nothing other than a healthy effort to fill the void which the destruction of Gothic architecture has left.
"[2] Thus Tillyer is saved from what Fuller sees as late modern art's "greatest weakness": ending in "aesthetic failure" in pursuit of "an abstract 'art of the real'.
Yet at the same time, according to Lynton, Tillyer seems to be stating something which "comes perilously close to the thoughts of that famous piece of versifying: 'Poems are made by fools like me / But only god can make a tree.'
"[2] The implication here seems to be that while Tillyer could, had he wished, have created paintings which cajoled the viewer to bask in the pleasures that convincing landscape images provide, he elected not to, instead utilising a marked economy of means to suggest form, using, for example, only a single brushstroke to articulate a cloud, or the canopy of a tree, as in Untitled (1989).
In them, writes David Cohen, Tillyer "juxtaposes the organic and the geometric, the gestural and the rational, the empirical (felt, observed) and the ideal (thought, imposed).
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.
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.
"[2] For the art historian this raises all sorts of difficulties, but the underling truth in what Tillyer outlines was known to the great innovators of Modern art, to Gauguin and Cézanne especially, as is shown by their efforts to abandon not only academic illusionism but also the illusionism of tone and colour still purveyed by Impressionism, in favour of a new flatness and formal, as opposed to naturalistic, rightness; also known to Matisse, Kandinsky, Malevich etc., who gave priority to the demands of the pictorial object and of their media.
And surely by at the very latest 1950, roughly the time when Matisse made his great paper cut-out compositions, and Pollock his finest drip works, the Albertian tradition of the tabula quadrata as a window on to reality had been set aside, countered by something equally powerful.
It is quite another to change the language of painting altogether, fracturing its traditional logic by introducing other, conventionally incongruous media, as in Tillyer's substitution of the canvas for a wire lattice in his earlier Mesh works.
The kachina doll, writes Tillyer in the catalogue, is "icon-like," and provided him "with a vehicle to explore the dialogue between nature seen romantically and the geometry of man-made forms" to which the series (and much of his earlier work) makes reference.
Big forms, on the surface as paint, run swiftly from top to bottom, sometimes organic and gestural, or else hard and geometric, flat and voluminous, relief and planar.
They attempt to deal with the artist's strongly felt ideas about landscape and the nature of painting: of the eternal struggle between artifice and reality implicit in the creation, consumption and ontology of all art.
