bernard jacobson gallery
Watercolours with an essay by john yau
On the cover: William Tillyer Reflections on the Esk The Mulgrave Watercolours 2019 Watercolour on perforated Arches paper Series: The Mulgrave Watercolours 57.2 x 76.2 cms (22 1/2 x 30 ins)
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William Tillyer’s Visual Treatises on The Continuum. Essay by John Yau
I.
Before focusing solely on the watercolors of William Tillyer, I want to establish a context that I believe will further illuminate our understanding of the oblique relationship he maintains between abstraction and the natural world. Entering the scene in the early 1960s, at a time when form and content were thought to have achieved an apotheosis in pure abstraction, Tillyer elected to make abstractions that instead recognized that we are a part of nature. Because nature is so much larger, denser, and, conceptually speaking, vaster than we can comprehend, our immediate experience of it is always partial, provisional and transitory. Tillyer’s reasoning wasn’t purely aesthetic, but was motivated by a world-view that needs to be stated at the outset, since it has exerted an enormous influence on all of his decisions. In 2000, the artist was invited to the far south west of Ireland, which he had long wanted to visit, “to stay in a remote studio/house, in a restored pre-famine village in County Kerry.” During his stay, he reflected upon his lifelong understanding of the unseen forces integral to a common perception, and how the relationship of the invisible and visible impacted upon his work. “One day in Kerry I notice, high up in a clear blue sky, a small torpedo-shaped cloud that, as it slowly moves south east, has to gain height in order to deal with the thermals over the hills and mountains. Or rather the cloud is influenced by the thermals, which in their turn are caused by the mountains. The interconnectedness of the whole system has always stimulated my thoughts. The giro-like exchange of energy in this continuum inspired a number of prints in the early 1960s, but it wasn’t until I produced etchings with a lattice motif – “The Lattice Etchings” (1969-1973) – that I felt that I had found a truly apt representationfor the concept that everything in life is connected.” As we shall see, “The Lattice Etchings” lead to his first series of watercolors, “The Lattice Interiors/Mrs Lumsden’s” (1972) and “A Furnished Landscape” (1972), works in which the figure/ground relationship is meaningfully entangled. Tillyer’s sense of interconnectedness informs his relationship to both his materials and art, particularly that of the past, which he wants to engage, even as many contemporary artists and theorists declare large parts of it obsolete. For him, the invention of oil paint by Jan Van Eyck is as important and useful to his work as the anti-art of Marcel Duchamp. Contrary to the dominant trends of the 1960s and 70s – Minimalism’s purity, Pop’s promiscuousness, and Conceptual Art’s reliance on text – Tillyer concluded that abstraction and representation were not incompatible, and that abstraction, rather than standing apart from the complexities of the natural world, could and must embrace it. From the beginning, Tillyer approached his project in watercolor like a scientist,
as interested in the physical nature of his medium as he is in the representation of subject, which he tellingly calls “a furnished landscape,” that is, a landscape marked by human presence. Purity was never the goal, because paradise was not something we could return to. The issue was how to put the two together, to recognize that “[m]an cannot step outside nature,” that “[h]e is nature, and therefore so are his thoughts and products.”. Recognizing his undertaking as an “awkward task,” Tillyer’s philosophical inquiry is marked by a continual questioning of assumptions regarding the problematic relationship between denotation and connotation, abstraction and representation, material and art, the real and illusion. By embracing this endeavor, as fully and thoroughly as he does, Tillyer likely realized that the chasm separating denotation and connotation would prevent their resolution into an easily categorized aesthetic unity, particularly when the element of space was entered into the equation. Whereas a similarly philosophical artist like Gerhard Richter would use a photograph of a landscape (a flat mediated image/thing) as a source, Tillyer finds a way to let watercolor be what it is: stains, spills, and colored dust. Thus, as he responds to the landscape, he employs a painterly vocabulary that corresponds, on a metaphysical level, with an abstraction consisting of dried puddles (blots and washes), rivulets (calligraphic strokes), and shifting color and light (dispersions of dust) to create images of landscapes (dirt and vegetation) interacting with the atmosphere (water and dust) and, in many cases, man-made structures, while honoring the integrity of each. This unity/division not only informs Tillyer’s watercolors from the outset, but it makes these works indispensable in the largest sense. The world, we have come to learn, is interconnected and everything we do has, as the artist says, “repercussions.” With this understanding, one could say that Tillyer recognized that art and life are never separate, and that aesthetics and ethics are one and the same. Without an established discourse’s safety net championing either self-sustaining abstraction or the depiction of nature, Tillyer knew that he would have to make up the rules as he went along, that there would be no guidelines. His decision gains even more poignancy when we understand that he chose nature as his subject not out of nostalgia, but from a sense of urgency, a realization that “[t]here is no separation or difference between man, his products and the rest of nature: in this sense, all is one.” Add this to the fact that he chose to work in watercolor, a medium that was not held in high regard when he began his first series, and we begin to get a sense of how much he has achieved over the past four decades. While Tillyer’s statements about interconnectedness may suggest that there is a spiritual component to his vision, I would advance that it is more deeply rooted in the scientific, particular in terms of ecology, and the mathematic, utilizing fractals
rather than divine numbers. To the notion that “all is one,” he brings an original understanding of what it means to be true to one’s materials, which in his case would be both watercolor and the landscape, a combination that yells “amateur painter,” but here encapsulates the daunting goal he has set for himself, nothing less than the reinvention and revitalization of a medium and subject matter long considered old fashioned. The artist is very explicit about this. Writing on “The Fallingwater Variations” (1993-1994), a group of watercolors based on the cantilevered house designed and built by Frank Lloyd Wright, a building meant to echo as well as interact with its immediate surroundings, he observed: “Watercolour with its slow laborious build up of thin veils of pigmented water was perfect for making an image which would retain every gestural mark, an image embodying its own creative history. In some ways, they are as much about watercolour as any ideas about architecture and landscape.” This awareness of being equally truthful to one’s materials, processes, and subject matter is characteristic of Tillyer’s scientific disposition. He isn’t interested in the long entrenched either/or dichotomy that haunts much modern and contemporary art, but in the discovery of links between abstraction and representation. He is examining the connotative and denotative possibilities of the language of art without coming to a conclusion about either. Instead of settling for one side of the dichotomy or the other, or seeking refuge in the critical discourses it has given birth to, I believe that Tillyer’s operative linguistic pairing is both/and. And within this pairing lies the artist’s characteristic terseness, which proceeds from his adamant refusal to elaborate or show-off. There are never any flourishes or signs of bravado in his work; everything arises out of necessity, and the desire to be crystalclear about elusive experiences, all the while remaining true to the material nature of the medium. In Tillyer’s watercolors, where the “awkward task” is to discover the various bonds between medium and subject, while respecting what is intrinsic to each, I would advance that each of his works can be understood as both a singular statement and part of a visual treatise. And yet, if the term “visual treatise” suggests something dry and didactic about the watercolors, and possibly the presence of a moralizing tone, a cursory look at any one among the many that the artist has done over the past four decades will prove that nothing could be further from the truth. They are resonant and beautiful while subverting the constrictive conventions associated with beauty. From his very first series of watercolors, “Latticed Interiors/Mrs. Lumsden’s “ (1972), “Furnished Landscape” (1972), and “Verona” (1974), where Tillyer establishes the basic components of his vocabulary and approach to subject matter, the intellect goes hand-in-hand with pleasure. At various times, this unexpected and welcome conjunction has resulted in a misunderstanding on the part of critics who
regard watercolor as a secondary medium largely used by amateurs and therefore not worthy of serious consideration. As even a rank amateur knows – and is prone to exploit, particularly with landscape – dramatic effects are easy to come by. Add to this the fact that critics have become increasingly distrustful of pleasure, and it isn’t too much of a stretch to understand why some are unable to accept the sensuousness and sensitivity, as well as the directness and bluntness, that are inherent in all of the artist’s watercolors. Rooted in watercolor’s particular behavioral properties, Tillyer’s geometric forms and veils of vibrant color invite us into the visible world, gently pressing us to become more aware of how fleeting and nuanced our experiences can be. His watercolors are not mementoes of a place, but invocations to see more clearly and closely, to look more deeply. After all, we never lose sight of the fact that we are looking at streaks and puddles of dispersed granules of color—the material nature and inherent behavior of watercolor is something the artist never tries to suppress in his work. Tillyer has understood and transformed a central feature of Jackson Pollock’s legacy into the most unlikely of mediums, watercolor, while refusing to follow in the footsteps of those who claimed everything had to be purely abstract. In fact, the artist seems to have understood the implications of Pollock’s well-known declaration, “I am nature” by de-emphasizing the “I” in favor of the medium’s “nature.” This is the duality Tillyer’s watercolors engender in us: we look and we see ourselves looking. And in this gap we are able to contemplate the intrinsic characteristics of seeing and - ideally speaking - become more conscious of how we interact with our immediate surroundings. Urgency and delicacy, constant change and seeming stillness, embrace before our eyes – a wide range of subtleties Tillyer achieves with incredible economy and decisiveness. Full of longing and seductiveness, North of Fort William, Scotland (1985) pulls me into its delicate tonalities, coloristic shifts, and layered touches; its hushed celebration is haunted ever so slightly, yet firmly, by a mournfulness bordering on (but never tipping over into) elegy, yet I am always aware that it is made up of layered puddles and washes of dried, colored water. I am looking at a piece of water-stained paper, but do I want to be a literalist and deny the useful and necessary power of the human imagination? This seems to be one of the ongoing arguments Tillyer has with his more literal-minded contemporaries. Without fanfare, a Tillyer watercolor tells us in quiet tones that this moment – both the work itself and the world it evokes – happens only once. We do not escape our material existence, but live in time, and chaos is always beckoning us closer—a fact we can hardly bear and most often chose to ignore. Isn’t imagination, among other things, something that helps us endure time’s passing? Didn’t Charles Baudelaire advance that the painter of modern life had to be a “solitary individual endowed with an active imagination?”
Determined to continue his inquiry, Tillyer seems to never avert his eyes from the changing material world. This state of heightened consciousness, which equates looking with contemplation and inquiry, is what infuses the beauty of his watercolors with sharp and powerful feeling, an aching acceptance that he invites us, within our own limited circumstances, to bear witness. We sense that each touch of the brush is that of a man trying to remember everything, and the places where the brush has not touched the paper acknowledges how incomplete our memory and life remain.
seems to have noticed: watercolor is basically dried stains marked by dust. However dramatic and subtle his watercolors are, Tillyer never lets us forget this incontrovertible fact. Even Cotman moved away from this realization by resorting to illusionism and pictorial elaborations.
Tillyer’s watercolors are not a reprisal of William Wordsworth’s emotions “recollected in tranquility,” but a fresh, probing, open-ended inquiry. They do not continue the familiar Romantic gestures toward either the spiritual or the sublime. In the upper left corner of The North York Moors, falling sky (1985), the two powdery rain clouds, with one veiling the other, wield a visceral presence. We are looking at the dispersal of colored dust after the water has dried. Order and randomness inhabit the same powdery cloud; a water stain (evidence of fecundity) and pigment (dust) are suspended in an unending tension before our eyes. Sight and touch—two ways we apprehend reality—have been made inseparable in a medium thought to be almost only about light and theatrical flourishes. Tillyer extends watercolor’s breadth. When he wishes, he can evoke the density of moisture and how it changes across a wide expanse, manipulating the colored dust that gives watercolor its particular hue. As I stated in the beginning, his insight into watercolor’s essential nature infuses the work with a metaphysical current that we should never lose sight of. Tillyer reveals his extreme sensitivity to the most elusive yet most common aspects of experience: changing light, the bond between solidity and ghostliness, and the passing of time. Looking at, and remembering the everyday world of weather, light and place, the artist evokes our inner weather, that mysterious place where earlier generations believed the soul resided. However beautiful they are, and many of them are extremely beautiful, almost painfully so, Tillyer’s watercolors never lead us away from the real world in favor of an Edenic vision. Rather, they bring us back to the here and now, to water and dirt, the basis of our existence and our destiny. The artist’s re-envisioning of the characteristic qualities of watercolor is a unique contribution to both contemporary art and the tradition of English watercolor, as exemplified by artists, such as John Cotman, Alexander Cozens, John Constable, and J.M.W. Turner. Rather than reprising their work, he makes their subject matter his by transforming it into something different and new. In his combinations of visual treatise and seductive beauty, Tillyer has done nothing less than revitalize a nearly dead medium, as well distinguish his work from both those contemporaries who depict nature and those who banish it from their work. It is an unparalleled achievement. He has done so by recognizing and expanding upon what nearly no one before him, except perhaps Alexander Cotman,
William Tillyer Study for a Furnished Landscape 2 1972, Watercolours
On more than one occasion, Willem de Kooning stated that flesh was the reason oil paint was invented. Although we know otherwise, is it possible to expand upon his observation, and say that watercolor--at least as artists refined its use in 18th –and 19th – century England --was invented because of the weather? Certainly, it is the medium best suited to celebrate sky and air, ever changing forms interacting with solid forms, such as mountains, as well as evoke atmospheric light. Like clouds, watercolor is made of water to which pigment (colored dust) has been added. Its marks cannot be erased or easily covered over, so there is a sense of the performative at work if the artist remains true to the process, which Tillyer does. In 18th – and 19th century England, science and art, acute observation and the medium of watercolor, were brought into close proximity. One thinks of the many artists who, laboring in a workshop, first applied watercolor to the skies on topographic and architectural drawings. They were the first snapshots, an acutely precise visual diary of the immediate world, and a detailed topographical record of the landscape. Long before it was a medium for artists, watercolor was a functional tool. And concurrent with the rise of watercolor was the invention of weather, particularly clouds.
II.
Historically speaking, in 1796, the English scientist Luke Howard began using names like cirrus, cumulus, nimbus, and stratus to separate clouds into distinct groups, imbuing them with a structural typology. Applied to things which are continually shifting, where fixity has no place, his nomenclature remains in constant use, even as it has been continually added to. Do we have more types of clouds in the 21st Century than the 18th because of widespread industry, more acute powers of observation, or both? It was on the daily walk between his house and laboratory that Howard began making detailed observations, which were subsequently published in the book, Essay on the Modifications of Clouds. Using Howard’s book as a guide, John Constable began his series of extraordinary cloud studies, often filling their versos with copious notes. However dormant the confluence of the scientific and artistic had become by the 1960s, particularly in the realm of abstraction, this is one of the many histories William Tillyer knowingly intersected when he began using watercolor. While a small part of his genius has to do with history and circumstance – what one is tempted to call fate – the larger more important part has to do with the inventiveness with which he has repeatedly advanced his project, which, in formal and metaphysical terms, can be described as the collision between form and dissolution, solidity and transparency, dust and water. Watercolor, as Tillyer’s work makes clear, exists in three interconnected states. It begins as a suspension of pigment in water, which is effected by its application to paper and the inevitability of evaporation, where it becomes desiccated dust bound within a dried puddle. Although a form may brim over with colored light, the artist knows it is made of pulverized matter. It is this process, and its ramifications, that he has extended into original territory as well contemplated throughout his career.
When we consider the synthesis of these formal characteristics with subject matter and compare it to the astonishing achievements of 19th century English watercolorists, a history that Tillyer knows well, we gain an insight into the deep roots of his project, its radically original expansiveness and metaphysical implications. For one thing, however formally rigorous and innovative his watercolors are, they are neither limited by these strictures nor do they settle for the pictorial. This is one measure of his inventiveness and deep insight. In another context, writing about Tillyer’s paintings, I advanced that “he has no agenda other than discovering what freedom can be gained for the imagination in an age that has declared that painting is dead, and there is nothing left to discover.” A similar thing could be said about his investigation of watercolor. He has made it fresh and open-ended, imbued it with possibilities and resonant feelings.
John Constable Cloud Study 1922, Oil paint on paper on board Photo © Tate
From the very outset, Tillyer’s watercolors are informed by his coolly conceptual approach, which brings abstraction and representation together without subsuming one or the other. This duality infuses his watercolors with an undeniable modernity while distancing them from their antecedents, particularly the purely pictorial. His watercolors are analytical, yet they encompass a vision or world-view. The conscious and deliberate restraint he brings to a medium celebrated for its poetic expressiveness marks the beginning of its revitalization. Like a day laborer building a wooden fence, and in this regard echoing one of his recurring subjects, Tillyer initially made diagonal grids, or what he called “lattices,” out of an unadorned, rudimentary vocabulary. Thus, he started out by thoroughly separating watercolor from its long history of dramatic effects.
III.
By rejecting personal and stylistic flourishes, Tillyer went a long way toward replacing the historical view of the watercolorist as sojourner to distant and exotic locales with that of the artist as an anonymous worker, an image that is in keeping with the ideal that Picasso and Braque aspired to during their invention of Cubism. By developing a basic, non-expressive abstract vocabulary to bring abstraction and representation together, Tillyer explored a territory bordering the one Mondrian investigated with his plus-minus vocabulary in the “Pier and Ocean” drawings from 1914-1915: where does abstraction and reality meet and become inseparable? The difference, and it is not a small one, is that Tillyer worked in watercolor, rather than pencil, which is considered more neutral. In his first series, “The Lattice Interiors/Mrs. Lumsden’s” (1972) and “A Furnished Landscape” (1973), Tillyer limited his use of watercolor to thin bars of subdued tonalities arranged in a diagonal grid or grids. In two other series that followed soon after, “Vase and Arrangement” (1973-74) and “Verona” (1974), he expanded his basic vocabulary to include daubs and short diagonal strokes, or what I would call controlled puddles. Done within a short period of time, these initial, fully realized series reveal an artist working with – as well as testing – a highly circumscribed vocabulary put through a variety of tonal and coloristic shifts in order to understand the way we see and represent the world. Among the subjects he explores and reinvents from the ground up is the genre of still-life, specifically an arrangement of flowers in an ordinary blue and white porcelain vase, a theme to which he has returned a number of times during his career. In House and Garden and Pool (1972), which is part of “The Lattice Interiors/Mrs. Lumsden’s,” Tillyer uses a diagonal grid of largely pale blue lines, with one area of darker violet-browns merging into a figure/ground relationship with the white, untouched areas of the paper (the diamond shapes formed by the grid) so that the unpainted areas are as important as the painted parts. Tillyer’s investigation of the interaction between the stained and untouched is unparalleled. In House and Garden and Pool, we feel as if we are looking through, as well as looking into, an abstract space populated by geometric forms and shapes that are simultaneously porous and solid, a combination which we might regard as the artist’s commentary
on the nature of reality. Depth and flatness tug at each, with neither able to subdue the other. Working with a pared-down vocabulary, Tillyer has reversed everything; it is the bands, or what we are inclined to read as a chain link fence or barrier, that contain the visual information. In House and Garden and Pool and other works in the series, the artist both reprises and restates pointillism, as well as anticipates the rise of the personal computer, where the pixel is the basic unit by which reality is translated into images on a screen. Early works such as this suggest that Tillyer never believed that sight, whether engaging with art or with nature, could be distilled down to pure sensation. Rather, it, like the world we inhabit, was both a given and a construction. In titling one series “A Furnished Landscape,” a theme that the artist has periodically returned to throughout his career, Tillyer underscores his belief that there is no such thing as a virginal landscape; that human beings have marked nature, and are a part of it too. At the same time, we get a glimmer of why he might have rejected Color Field and Minimalist abstraction, strains that were particularly strong in America during the early phase of his career. Paradise, even in the form of pure color, is an illusion because it embodies a purity that can never be truly attained. In the series, “Vase and Arrangement” (1974-1975), in which he explored the motif of ordinary flowers in a generic white porcelain vase decorated with short blue, diagonal bands, Tillyer arrived at a conclusion that was ignored by formalist critics such as Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. Sight is always a construction; it is never direct and unmediated because mind, memory, and cultural context inevitably play a role. As scientists have recently advanced, we remember a face because the mind turns it into a collection of details, a caricature of the real thing. It is never the whole face we remember, let alone be able to verbally describe. We are not cameras. Given this fact of our mind-body relationship, it seems pertinent to ask how much or little do we need to see before we know what a thing is? By asking these questions, Tillyer examines the way we see in addition to underscoring our connectedness with nature. Made of fattish daubs and diagonal dashes of color, the highly witty Vase and Red Arrangements (1974) goes a long way toward conveying the impression that seeing is essentially an abstract act that the mind is compelled to give a name to. One might also deduce from this work that there are at least two states of cognition, pre and post-verbal. By joining together, in varying proximities, five very simple, related patterns, Tillyer evokes a vase with red and pink flowers, and at the same time quietly but forcefully asks: do we actually see and experience the flowers we put in a vase or do we content ourselves with evoking the associations that their presence brings into our daily lives? What is our relationship to the world we dwell in? By making an essentially abstract watercolor of a rather ordinary floral arrangement, Tillyer comments on the world of nature and art, both their separateness and connectedness. When do we see and experience what is in front of our eyes? It is their confrontation with questions such as these that give the
watercolors their urgent edge. By 1975, after having completed a number of series, developed and tested a pared-down, abstract vocabulary devoid of flourishes, and reinvented the ideal of an anonymous artist-laborer working in the unlikely medium of watercolor, Tillyer was confident enough to take on the great English landscape painter and watercolorist, John Constable, without resorting to the most obvious strategy, pastiche. If we assume that pastiche, in order to comply with postmodernist theory, must be satirical in intent, then Tillyer may strike us as being out of tune with the times. Sincerity rather than sarcasm has been his driving force. However, pastiche in the largest sense need not be satirical nor an ironic confection of glib quotations; this is postmodernism at its weakest and least compelling, an academic exercise. For all of his considerable knowledge of art history, and his far ranging, ongoing dialog with it, Tillyer has never been an academic artist, someone whose work stands apart from the realm of human affairs, which, as he has made clear, includes nature. In his series “For John Constable “(1975), Tillyer began extending the reach of his abstract vocabulary of grids, daubs, and washes in order to evoke specific landscapes enveloped in particular atmospheric conditions, such as a mist or a squall of clouds. In this early synthesis of an abstract vocabulary and Romantic subject matter, one sees the internal conflict of an artist whom David Cohen characterized as being “supremely classical, despite his deep, sustaining affinities with the masters of the English Romantic tradition.” Rather than reiterating the ineffable or reprising the sublime, the artist’s rigorously analytical approach breaks down his subject matter – Branch Hill Pond (View of Hampstead) (1975), for example – into simple abstract marks, which, in this case, are comprised of green daubs and pale bluish gray, vertical streaks. The result is the fundamental collision animating all of Tillyer’s watercolors; they are simultaneously abstract and representational. They may tilt more in one direction or another, but they never comfortably reside in either category. In this regard, they are hybrids, an interconnected condition he will turn his attention to in the early 1990s. Tillyer’s “awkward task” is concerned with something very basic; how do we live in the world we have been given? Works such as Branch Hill Pond (View of Hampstead) push Seurat’s pointillism and Signac’s divisionism into new territory, in which the artist is more improvisational and sensitive to change and movement, though no less rigorous. Recalling, Seurat’s conté crayon drawings, the artist has brought touch and sight together in a medium not known for being conducive to the visceral. In 1975-76, Tillyer and his family moved to Providence, Rhode Island (USA), where he would teach at Brown University. Shortly after arriving, he saw an exhibition of Chinese scroll paintings at the university’s List Gallery, which led him to start “Chinese Waterfalls” (1976), a new series on long vertical formats. Made up of abstract marks ranging from the calligraphic to blots and elongated stains, Tillyer
built upon both Alexander Cozens’s use of the blot as a starting point as well as the calligraphic strokes in Chinese Classical scrolls. Additionally, by working on a vertical format, Tillyer introduced a new possibility into his inquiry, that of the relationship between subject and support, which he has gone on to align and entangle in a wide range of inventive ways. In Classical Chinese painting, the waterfall is regarded as an image of time’s relentless passing and matter’s continual transformation; it is venerated as the quintessential embodiment of reality’s endless process of birth and destruction. Contemplation of the waterfall instills the individual with an awareness of how he or she is an intrinsic part of nature, and cannot step back from its processes. In Tillyer’s watercolors, the waterfall’s irregular vertical shape underscores gravity’s constant pull, while its representation by means of an elongated, dried puddle of colored dust evokes our ultimate material destiny. An awareness of mortality shadows this series of watercolors, even as the artist celebrates the fleeting and the beautiful. Blunt and direct, “Chinese Waterfalls” restates the transitory in terms of chaos and destruction through the evocative potential of abstract washes, blots, and strokes. In a number of works in the series, we see a vertical shape enclosed within an abstract cocoon, all of which are overlaid with a few daubs and dashes of color. There is no attempt to fill the paper from edge to edge, or to depict a scene. The waterfalls are abstract, while also being representational, insisting that seeing is an act of translation, a sifting through of evidence, which must always be true to its sources. Looking back at the series of watercolors that Tillyer did during those first five years (1972 – 1976), it is apparent that he moved quickly and thoughtfully through a wide range of issues, including the viability of landscape and still-life. In all of these early works I marvel at the degree to which he is able to revitalize such well-known genres without devolving into the decorative or resorting to mechanical reproduction. He did so by utilizing a simple vocabulary, thus reinventing each of the genres he worked in without becoming caught in a style or relying on technical means. At the same time, mastery was never his intention, even as he grew ever more masterful. In contrast to many of his contemporaries, Tillyer’s approach was never cynical, ironic, or pessimistic. Closure was never his goal. Like a scientist or Baudelaire’s flaneur, he maintains as objective a stance as possible, even as he approaches a historically loaded medium and highly charged subject matter.
William Tillyer Study for 'For John Constable' Pencil and ink on paper
In the late 1970s, Tillyer and his family moved again, this time “from London to North Yorkshire, to a house on the banks of the river Esk overlooking a large fishing pool and a Stone Bridge.” (e-mail from artist, dated June 25, 2009). Having a little while earlier explored subjects associated with John Constable, Tillyer literally moved into a landscape that was explored by 19th Century English watercolorists, particularly those who were part of the Norwich School. By taking up residence in a landscape depicted by generations of English watercolorists, the artist consciously became an integral part of that landscape rather than an occasional observer. Tillyer also recognized that the stone bridge at Esk shared a structural affinity with the “Greta Bridge” painted by John Sell Cotman, which was also near his home. Living, as it were, inside late 19th Century subject matter must have been particularly daunting for an artist whose approach is so coolly conceptual, even when it is informed by his deep feelings for place. However, rather than resisting this world, he embraced it. This is one of the defining aspects of Tillyer’s career: he faces things head-on, never wavering in his ambition to make the most familiar and even the most generic things fresh.
IV.
In his series, “Esk Bridge” (1980), Tillyer introduced textured and embossed wallpaper into his work. On one level, he was underscoring his preoccupation with the interaction of the manmade and nature, as well as quietly reminding us that wallpaper is a common way of bringing motifs and generic scenes of nature into the house. Wallpaper was an early substitute for painting. As painted wallpaper, his watercolors of the Esk Bridge were a hybrid of very different, divergent possibilities, art and mass production. At the same time, the textured paper, its swirl of grooves and ridges, is a visceral support that serves as a deliberate obstruction, denying mastery. Here again, we see the length to which Tillyer will go to undermine any sign of deftness or mastery he has gained, his deep distrust of beauty for its own sake. The motif of the bridge became a sign of order amid disorder, evidence of man amidst nature; it was a literal and metaphorical connector. A theme that the artist has continually returned to, the coexistence of deliberate structure and unimpeded wildness, with each inflecting its opposite, reminds me of Wallace Stevens’ poem, “Anecdote of the Jar,” which includes the lines: “The wilderness rose up to it,/And sprawled around, no longer wild.” The deep, ongoing question that Tillyer seems to be constantly wrestling with is man’s relationship to nature, and how, in the best interests of mankind, we should honor it as we continue to subdue it. By focusing on a stone bridge and its environs, Tillyer understood that he was deliberately bumping up against an image that had been previously explored by 19th-century English watercolorists, the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists (Paul Cezanne, Camille Pissaro, and Claude Monet), as well as by Japanese woodblock artists such as Hiroshige and Hokusai. The challenge was clear and bracing: can one do something fresh without relying on technical modes, like photography, or style, such as Roy Lichtenstein’s Benday dots, to update the
subject. Implicit in the artist’s decision is a criticism of those who believed that the only way to approach either representation or nature was through mechanical means. The ineradicable directness and transparency of watercolor are not only formal issues for Tillyer, but also moral ones. He opens his history before the viewer because he wants to show everything that he has done. Along with textured supports, Tillyer has with ferocious intelligence introduced collage and other mediums, such as pencil and crayon, into the works, thereby breaking watercolor open with an ever widening range of materials and processes. How much could the work be made to embrace? he always seems to be asking. And could a symphony be made out of distinct entities (colored marks and stains) in which each contribution is respected for its individuality? Formally speaking, could one stay true to one’s materials under these conditions? And philosophically speaking, how do these diverse components contribute to or create tension within Tillyer’s attempt to reconcile two diverse traditions, the classical desire for order and the expressionist courting of chaos, so that each acknowledges the necessity of its opposite?
disorder). Building upon “The Façade Drawings,” which were based on flowers and vines growing over the windows of Victorian-like houses in Melbourne, Tillyer introduced S-like shapes and other, more defined calligraphic strokes to evoke flower petals. In some of these works, the flower’s abstract petals (semi-transparent, colored, geometric shapes) echo the river’s current or the bridge’s arch. Differences and similarities overlap, so that looking becomes an act of untangling, separating and discerning, of naming. In both of the series that take the stone bridge and Esk River as their ostensible subject, Tillyer drives home the realization that in naming something, we fit it into a category. And in so doing, we not only remove ourselves from direct experience, but we reaffirm a basic condition that we seldom transcend.
By joining a wide breadth of opposing tendencies, while confronting the numerous associations and assumptions of historically loaded subject matter, Tillyer not only upped the stakes of his inquiry on many levels, but he transformed himself into a major artist, which is to say his work became essential. It must have occurred to him that his engagement with landscape was pulling him deeper into the realm of specificity, which supposedly demands a high degree of verisimilitude and the ability to reproduce what is seen, neither of which the artist wanted in his work. In order to deal with this challenge, he broadened his vocabulary of shapes and calligraphy without relinquishing its essential abstraction or distorting its material behavior. This is something that Tillyer has never lost sight of—the materials and the subject are equally important, and the former is not merely the means to depict the latter. Tillyer’s series, “Esk Bridge” (1980) are abstractions in which a geometric motif—the stone bridge—is integral to the work, even as the artist disassembles it. Torn shapes and ragged forms, echoing the vegetation and swirling power of the river, surround and partially cover the geometric motif of the bridge, all the while retaining their identity as pieces of paper attached to an uneven surface. We must put nature together, even as we pry it open and examine it. Creation and violence are inseparable, though to the artist’s credit he never romanticizes, exaggerates, or personifies this union, as many of his Romantic forebears did. In 1982, after a year as artist-in-residence at Melbourne University, Australia, where he completed the intensely colored series, “The Façade Drawings” (1981-82), in which structure and stain are woven together, Tillyer returned to the subject of the bridge in “Studies for Living by the Esk” (1982). In this watercolor series, the artist juxtaposed the motif of the bridge (solid geometric form) in nature (chaos and wildness) with that of the vase and flowers (another conjunction of order and
William Tillyer Esk Bridge 1980,Watercolour
After moving into a landscape that was familiar to him, having grown up in North Yorkshire, and knowing that it was a place rich in art history, Tillyer decided to embrace all of it, rather than reject any inconvenient part. This meant that he would engage with the whole tradition of Romantic art, particularly as defined by those painters who worked in watercolor, in order to discern whether it could be reinvented or not. The surprising thing is how fully he took up the challenge. In 1983, following in the footsteps of 19th English artists who made the Grand Tour, Tillyer took trips to France, Switzerland, and Italy, visiting and working in places recorded by Turner and others. However, he did not end up in Rome, but instead traveled to northern Italy and the Dolomites.
V.
It strikes me that in his desire to revitalize the medium of watercolor, Tillyer decided that he had to test his abstract approach against the great iconic examples of the past. If he had to take on the Romantic tradition, he would neither repeat nor parody it. Otherwise, watercolor would continue to be regarded as a secondary medium known primarily for its dramatic effects and flourishes. He seems to have asked whether or not he could confront scenes embedded in art history and make them fresh and contemporary. By taking up this challenge, Tillyer defines an ambition that also possessed Edouard Manet when he painted Olympia (1863). Not one to be coy about his intentions, Tillyer titled several of his series, which ranged from four to more than two dozen watercolors, “The Romantique Drawings, European Grand Tour,” followed by specific locales– “Haute Alps”, “Near Cannes,” “Near Antibes” “Swiss Lakes – Lugano,” “Near Aix,” and “Gorges du Verdun” (all 1983). Clearly, not only were the English Romantic artists on the artist’s mind, but also the Impressionists, and Pablo Picasso and George Braque when they struggled with Cubism. Tillyer’s subjects ranged from highly charged views, such as mist- enshrouded mountains, a sunset-lit lake interrupted by a tall pine, a row of palm trees in turbulent weather, to nearly generic ones, such as a simple house surrounded by tropical vegetation. Each view became a vehicle for testing and extending his abstract vocabulary and calligraphic marks, for discovering watercolor’s capacity to embrace the physical world. Looking becomes an hallucination, a state of heightened receptivity. Abstract shapes and ghostly forms jostled, joined, and overlaid each other, like semi-transparent matter seen through a microscope, in subdued tonalities of pale blue, green, and gray to hothouse bursts of fuchsia, pink, and orange. Along with his respect for watercolor’s materiality, its dried puddles and fine granules of pigment, Tillyer’s devotion to abstraction separates his “Grand Tour” watercolors from anything done by his predecessors, for whom verisimilitude was paramount. Even Turner, the most abstract of the Romantic artists, added carefully articulated details to his wild tangle of washes and brushstrokes. In the “Haute Alps,” we see the pictorial and the abstract perfectly meshed together, with our attention seamlessly shifting between the two. In one view, thick swirling clouds envelop the mountains, with a forest in the foreground, along the
bottom. In another view of the same work, washes of transparent color jostle with or lie over other washes. The scene appears to be forming and dissolving before our very eyes, conveying a state of constantly changing atmosphere. Nothing is fixed or permanent, not even the mountains. By leaving traces (the water and dust of the visible world echoed by the watercolor’s dried puddles and dessicated color) rather than defining solid pictorial forms, Tillyer gets at something basic about experience —reality exceeds our grasp and eludes us. When Tillyer seems to be exploring a realm that is more overtly pictorial, as in the series “Grand European Tour, House and Garden Antibes” (1983), it’s as if the house (a simple geometric form), palm tree (calligraphic lines) and surrounding vegetation (colored blots) are a mirage, at once semi-transparent and visible. Tillyer is always walking this tightrope between depiction and abstraction, between things and dried puddles, without succumbing to the numerous pitfalls that greet a less intrepid artist. While he has courted the pictorial in some works, and pure abstraction in others, he has never developed a system of simple, accessible signs that can be used as surrogates for things in the visible world. I would further add that he has never tried to disguise the fact that he is using watercolor, never attempted to establish a literal correspondence between an abstract mark and something found in nature, and never hesitated to let a mark be just that. In one of the seemingly more purely abstract works from this series, House and Garden Antibes (1983), red, blue, and dark blue circles of varying sizes, along with a Veronese green ellipse, float in front of colored streaks and an uneven blue ground in which the color has pooled and dried darker along the top and side edges. Tillyer has left an undefined space in the middle, with a faint hint of a geometric form between the floating shapes edged by the ground. It is as if reality is slipping through our sight. Do we need to know what the geometric shape is before we accept it? And if so, then how can we step out of our comfort zone and begin to experience the actual world we inhabit? Here, I get the sense that Tillyer is testing the connotative power of his medium, while also investigating the nature of seeing. What is it we do or don’t see, and how do we name or not name it? These are questions that resist reduction and even answers. Is the act of looking just a chain of discrete glimpses that the mind links together?
William Tillyer House and Garden Antibes 1983, Watercolour and gouache on paper
Between 1983 and 1987, Tillyer went full throttle. In 1983, he traveled in Europe and completed the various and widely different series grouped under the general title, “Romantique Drawings, Grand European Tours.” In 1984, he spent time in Los Angeles, California, and traveled through the American Southwest, to places such as the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley. This resulted in the series, “American Watercolours.” Between April 1985 and March 1987, he traveled throughout the British Isles and completed over two hundred works collectively titled “The English Watercolours.” Tillyer seems to have needed to test himself and his medium, as well as to investigate as wide a range of views as he could physically experience.
VI.
More than two decades later, the sheer amount of work and enormous breadth of what he achieved remains astonishing. Completely possessed, like Emily Dickinson or Rumi, when poem after poem seemed to spill out of them, unimpeded, the artist produced many masterful works that render obsolete the distinction between abstraction and representation. Coming after a decade of working on watercolors, but never with quite such ferocious concentration and intensity, this five-year period is unique in Tillyer’s career. The nearest equivalent I can think of is when the great woodblock artist Hiroshige made the prints for The Fifty Three Stations of the Tokaido between 1833 and ’34. As with Hiroshige, the thoroughness intrinsic to Tillyer’s project remains unrivalled. It’s as if each view, each physical encounter and the set of formal issues it engendered, gave birth to a sensitive inquiry into the nature of watercolor and the act of seeing. In the series “L.A. Byways,” Tillyer used long, narrow sheets measuring 20 x 60 inches as a support. The scale is modern and even monumental for a watercolor, evoking both the experience of driving in Los Angeles and the panoramic views we see in westerns. A wash of intense, mottled blue above abutting puddles of green becomes a landscape and an abstraction of a particular kind of landscape. A ghostly green vertical on the right-hand side can be read as a palm tree, but it also conveys space and distance. With just a few touches of his brush, Tillyer defines distance, spatiality, atmosphere, light, and air. I cannot think of another artist who could do so little to suggest so much. Another distinguishing feature is Tillyer’s keen sensitivity to the air, its constant movement or seeming stillness. This is most apparent in works from “The English Watercolours.” In The Downs, Outside Marlborough, which is mostly sky, the rounded white spaces—untouched by the brush—are clouds encircled by gently curving, pale blue dashes and daubs. The sinuous, slightly slanting, horizontal streaks between the sky’s rounded forms and the downs seem to be holding the clouds aloft, even as they connect the rounded forms above and below them. It’s as if Tillyer has envisioned the wind currents or what he calls the “thermals.” It’s a bright blowzy day. Using a vocabulary of washes and puddles, blunt yet delicate brushstrokes,
and no-nonsense calligraphic strokes, Tillyer seems capable of evoking any kind of weather, light, or landscape. No wonder he had to do what he did, which was to discover the limits of watercolor, limits that were not quickly apparent. The artist’s sense of the interconnectedness of color, light and movement is extremely acute and, at its root, philosophical. At the same time, for all its specificity and delicately nuanced feeling, The Downs, Outside Marlborough is not topographical. Tillyer is not using watercolor to map a view. He is making an abstraction to arrive at a vision, a world-view. This is why his watercolors are both great and necessary. He has invented a whole new possibility for watercolor, one that recognizes its distinctive history even as it disengages from it, and starts a new one.
William Tillyer L. A. Byways 1984, Watercolour on paper
I want to return to an earlier observation because it is a key to understanding Tillyer’s watercolors, and the changes that he initiated in them after he completed “The English Landscape Watercolors” (1987). By his own admission, the interconnectedness of the visible and invisible is integral to his world-view. As he wrote in 2000, while staying in the South West of Ireland: “The interconnectedness of the whole system has always stimulated my thoughts.” He went on to say that he is inspired by “[t]he giro-like exchange of energy in this continuum.” As we have come to expect, interconnectedness in Tillyer’s watercolors can occur on many different levels, ranging from the relationship between medium and subject matter to that of the watercolor and the paper support. For an artist who has made watercolors on embossed wallpaper, incorporated collage, and, in his earliest series, “The Lattice Interiors/Mrs Lumsden’s” (1972) and “A Furnished Landscape” (1972), explored and redefined the figure/ground relationship, the decision to isolate and develop different levels of interconnectedness between the watercolor medium and both subject matter and the paper support is not altogether surprising. It is the logical consequence of his earlier investigations, and a further measure of the innovations he has made within the medium of watercolor. Thus, he began tackling different possibilities, entanglements and configurations more or less simultaneously.
VII.
Having spent years devoting himself to the visible in landscapes as different as the Swiss Alps, the English countryside, and the American Southwest, Tillyer initially turned his attention to the unseen forces of nature that effect change, to what took place above the landscape. The artist began to work more slowly and deliberately in discrete layers, as well as push deeper into abstraction: “Sky and Landscape” (1987); “Sky Study Sheets” (1987); “Open Air” (1988); and “Calatrava (Ruminations) (1995). By slowing down what he already defined as a “slow laborious build up of thin veils of pigmented water,” Tillyer is able to use an abstract vocabulary to tease out the relationships between the veils and planes of color, as well as explore the gradients in the continuum linking opacity to transparency. Starting in 1993, in the series “Proscenium Vase,” which I will discuss in more detail shortly, Tillyer began extending his method of working in discrete layers to include the paper support. By cutting openings, tearing, perforating, and folding over a cut section of the paper, as well as by cutting the support’s outer edges to arrive at a distinct geometric shape, he transformed the support’s role into a major and defining one. Not only did he entwine figure and ground like lovers, but he registered the degree to which they depended on each other for their existence. Along with these technical innovations, the artist began incorporating photographic images, as well as utilizing the white, untouched areas of the support into the overall work in fresh and engaging ways. He found new ways to have the viewer both look at and into a work, as well as elevate the hybrid nature of his work into a singular realm. In effect, Tillyer, who had single-handedly transformed the 19th
Century medium of watercolor (topographical landscape) into a 20th Century pictorial medium (the inseparability of abstraction and representation), has in the past twenty years further transformed it into 21st Century hybrid form, at once pictorial and sculptural. Paralleling these brash technical innovations, Tillyer also further developed his abstract vocabulary to include the more overtly gestural (controlled splashes) and a wider range of hard-edged geometric forms. This ever-widening approach enabled the artist to hone in on the relationship of form, color, and light, and their interactions, in ever more particular ways. Over time, the artist’s increasingly stylized shapes evoked forms that are either undergoing metamorphosis or are in the midst of movement. The width of particular shapes and the tightness of the forms’s curves, for example, convey the different speeds they are moving, while the color relationships between them introduce another level of interconnectedness. By effectively slowing watercolor down, and turning the relationship between the medium and the support into a deliberate step-by-step process, Tillyer moved deeper into an unprecedented territory where everything was porous and elusive, and absolutely nothing was permanent.
William Tillyer The Proscenium Vase/Grey I 1993, Watercolour, relief, collage on paper
In “Sky and Landscape” (1987), “Sky Study Sheets” (1987), and “Open Air” (1988), the first series done after his long engagement with landscape, Tillyer evoked air currents, clouds, and atmosphere, often as a related group of rhythmic shapes. In this layered world, everything seems as if it is swirling about. Layering, juxtaposition, shifting scale, and counterpoint coexist. Not surprisingly, many of the watercolors from these series are simultaneously erotic and ethereal, opulent and austere. And yet, for all their abstraction, one feels that they are scientifically precise. This is what is so beguiling about them: they are simultaneously an abstract watercolor, a dramatic atmosphere, a cloudscape, and dried, shaped puddles—stains left by a mixture of evaporated water and powdery color. In his series “Sky Study Sheets,” Tillyer re-envisions John Constable’s “Cloud Studies,” as well as rejects his strictly observational approach. In Sky Study Sheet 4, for example, working back to front, the artist has superimposed, on the right hand side, three similarly shaped but progressively smaller, vertical swaths of color (ranging from dark blue to gray). These are clouds without names.
VIII.
The artist’s use of layers slows time down; the watercolor was not made on the spot, but was the result of a process that results in a palimpsest. We see into a layered space made of different densities, where light and form exchange identities. More than likely, we feel as if the exchange is occurring inside the melding of watercolor and support, rather than across the paper’s surface. And we left trying to see into a world that we cannot fully envision, even though it is all there in front of us. For all of Tillyer’s deliberateness, the watercolors lose none of their immediacy. The veils of color evoke sheets of rain, mist, and clouds without becoming nameable. Not only does the artist depict an “exchange of energy,’ but he also reenacts its dynamics in his work. Recognizing that the visible and invisible influence each other, Tillyer effectively turned his attention to the world above the landscape, an ethereal realm of robust change, until it became a recurring preoccupation. Imagine if Domenico Tiepolo, Constable, and Claude Monet, particularly when he was painting his “Water Lilies,” became abstract artists, and you begin to get the smallest inkling of what Tillyer achieves in these series, which could only have come after he explored a wide variety of landscapes and weather conditions. In doing so, he lifted the topographical English watercolor into a visionary possibility, a mode of abstraction unlike any other. In watercolors that took their cues from elusive conditions, as well as well as unseen forces, Tillyer extended the metaphysical implications of his medium. By making dried pools and desiccated color become their opposites – clouds, light, air and the wind – he evoked the cyclical process of rain and evaporation, and the constancy of exchange and transformation that is central to existence itself. In essence, it wasn’t the clouds above the landscape that he was depicting, but rather his view of reality as place of constant exchange. This view would become
increasingly evident in recent series, such as “Cocktail Works” (2005), “Loaded Systems” (2007), and “Metamorphosis” (2009), where the ostensible subject matter seems to be the interaction of abstract forms and nameless forces of nature, a dynamic world made possible only by watercolor. In one watercolor from “Sky and Landscape” (1987), Tillyer uses a constantly changing blue wash to frame curving blots and swaths of green. Ragged edges bump up against, and sometimes cover, adjacent areas. Dark tonalities coalesce along a stain’s edges, and there are puddles within puddles. Shapes and forms become actors in an unnamed drama in which becoming and dissolving are perfectly meshed – it is a world in constant flux. Tillyer’s skies do not feel theatrical, but inevitable. However much we might remind ourselves that we are looking at unaltered stains on paper, the artist’s deft combination of luminous color, sudden coloristic shifts and subtle tonal gradations attain a visionary power. While it is neither the infinity of William Blake nor the sublime of Edmund Burke, Tillyer’s vision of nature is no less powerful or challenging. More than just a heightened form of seeing, he has made the states of looking and hallucinating interchangeable. This is one of the cornerstones of the watercolors he did after “The English Landscape Watercolors.” In the series, “Sky and Landscape” (1987), “Sky Study Sheets” (1987), and “Open Air” (1988), Tillyer works in a way that shares something with Color Field artists, and their use of staining, but challenges anything that they have done, even though they work on a far larger scale with a much more recognized medium, paint. This is because he recognizes that art-for-art’s sake is largely concerned with formal and aesthetic issues, and ultimately separates itself from the world of human affairs. As beautiful as many Color Field paintings are, they all too often lack the urgency and expansiveness that informs Tillyer’s art. Morris Louis and Jules Olitski domesticated Pollock’s abstractions by suppressing all that is unruly in them. It is this aspect of nature that Tillyer never loses sight of. However, by defining a different trajectory, one that never loses contact with nature, his “Sky Study Sheets” go beyond the pictorial drama of Constable’s objective studies of clouds, and become abstract dramas, at once precise and imaginative. In his series “Open Air,” he evokes an airy world where, as in John Keat’s definition of “Negative Capability,” he inhabits “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” In Tillyer’s world, the precise and the factual are never allowed to suppress the mysterious and the uncertain. For him, reason alone is not enough. Although his watercolors are inspired by close observation and an extensive knowledge of the natural world, viewers are unable to determine exactly what they are looking at: clouds; light passing through mist; or thermals (rather than clouds). Abstraction and representation have become perfectly synced; and all the colored marks and washes are simultaneously connotative and denotative. We are looking at a world before names pin everything down.
William Tillyer Sky and Landscape 1987, Watercolour on paper
In the series “Proscenium Vase” (1993), Tillyer returned to an earlier theme – the furnished landscape. He tore and cut a gently curving, vertical opening (proscenium) in which he placed a vertical rectangle (vase). The ragged-edged, abstract shapes extending from the top, unevenly torn edge infuses the vase with a visceral presence. Formally, the figure (vase) and ground (proscenium) subvert each other’s authority, as well as make the act of distinguishing them beside the point. In “Proscenium Vase,” “Fallingwater – Ebb and Flow” (1993), and “Bedford Hills” (2001), Tillyer underscores the “interconnectedness” of medium and support by utilizing their distinct properties to create unexpected relationships. In counterpoint to Cubism, where a unitary subject is made of separate parts that are fitted together, the watercolors in “Proscenium Vase” are made of distinct things that interpenetrate each other. The figure (the vase of flowers) is framed by the ground, which has been turned into a proscenium. Starting with his “Latticed Interiors,” reversals of all kinds have been of deep interest to this artist.
IX.
In “Fallingwater – Ebb and Flow” (1993), Tillyer uses the tears and cuts to explore the continuum where structure and wildness coexist as well as meld into each other. The cut and torn spaces evoke Wright’s famed house precariously perched amidst a welter of growth. On a formal level, the artist’s abstract forms and marks exist in a continuum ranging from the gestural to the geometric. In the series “The Bedford Hills” (2001), Tillyer perforated the watercolor paper in different ways, including cut-out circles and incomplete rectangles, where he painted on the back or torn-up side. Not only did he subvert the conventions governing a stable figure-ground relationship, but he also developed different methods to make the support more than just a surface upon which the artist applies a medium. In “Variations on a Theme of an Encounter” (2001) and “The Age of Anxiety” (2001), which were done in County Kerry, Ireland, around the time of 911 and the horrific collapse of the Twin Towers on the lower end of Manhattan on a blue cloudless morning, Tillyer cut the edges of the paper to echo and physically contain the horizontal gestural marks, reinforce their existence as things, at once man-made and as forces of nature. He underscored the interaction of gesture and support by matting them so that the cut edges framed the cut paper. Expansiveness and control, and sensuousness and violence, are entwined, with no easy resolution offered. One sees in Tillyer’s multi-layered encounters, and their inextricable interactions,, a resonant metaphor for the larger political and social forces colliding against each other both in Ireland and elsewhere. In other, more recent series, the titles suggest that he is exploring the signifying power of his abstract vocabulary, as well as the mixture of the geometric and non-geometric. I am thinking of “Farrago” (2004), “Cocktail Works” (2005), “Loaded Systems” (2007), and “Metamorphosis” (2009), whose titles signify a mixture of things and states of change. In these series, the curving parallel lines (a descendant of the lattices) and wing-like shapes convey movement, things interacting with each
other, and the luminous white of their surroundings. In this rhythmic realm, every semi-transparent form and radiant presence seems to be reorganizing both its delineation and substance. Informed by his close observation of nature and by his long engagement with watercolor, Tillyer’s vision grows increasingly abstract while remaining firmly rooted in nature. Instead of evoking a specific place or a familiar condition—clouds gathering in the sky—he now can make a world of interacting forces and things coalesce on paper. He has left the world of names and categories behind, and taken us with him. This is the most recent feature of his accomplishment. At the same time, the works in “Farrago” feel like they could be studies for a sculpture, they are that visceral. During the past decade, Tillyer arrived at a place of openness and possibility, definitiveness and mystery, without showing the slightest sign of slowing down. As an artist who has combined different visual languages and materials, including collage and watercolor; worked on textured surfaces; cut the paper so that its edges interacted with the watercolor’s forms; and cut open and torn apart the support, he has achieved the most difficult possibility of all – he has remained open and experimental.
William Tillyer In the South in the Age of Anxiety (9) 2003, Watercolour on Arches paper
Tillyer’s work constantly raises questions but seldom provides answers. This is central to his inquiry. In his “Cadiz Study Sheets” (2005), he incorporated images derived from photographs he took while he had a residency in the port city of Cadiz, Spain. Interested in Moorish patterns and contemporary fabrics, he interlaid, overlaid, and juxtaposed photographic images and watercolor without either subsuming the other. More watercolor-like than photographic, the images and colors vibrated against each other or within the white paper, which, in some cases, he cut open as well as collaged. In his various layerings, Tillyer not only synthesized the optical and visceral, but he made them contingent and multivalent. In these watercolors, which are far more percussive than his other series, the dissonant combinations and multiple layerings evoke the constant whir of activity in this seaport city, as well as the quick glimpses that tug at one’s memory. One likely source of inspiration is flamenco’s rhythmic clapping and stamping. The images of printed fabric also remind us how much geometry and abstraction are part of the pleasure of everyday life, as well as echo the artist’s own interest in lattices and other repeating structures and functional forms. And, as Tillyer’s watercolors make clear, abstraction is neither a distillation nor an idea. It is a rich sensual presence in our daily life, a rhythmic structure we inhabit.
X.
Always determined to uncover the deepest connections, and more often than not finding ones that others have failed to discern, Tillyer’s engagement with watercolor is unequaled. The results remain astonishingly inventive and moving long after we have stopped looking. He may consider them as studies, but they constitute a powerful and self-sufficient body of work in a diverse oeuvre that crosses boundaries, genres and visual languages in ways that are thoroughly postmodern. Tillyer’s accomplishment is nothing less than the reinvention of watercolor in ways that go well beyond his many innovative contributions to the medium. By emphasizing the interconnectedness of watercolor’s materiality and the physical world, he strips away the persistent illusion – the habit of thought – that man-made things will be able to subjugate nature and change. It is the inhuman world he shows us and celebrates in all its manifestations, from the bridge over the Esk to the leafy undergrowth surrounding it, from bursts of radiant light to swaths of powdery granules.
Made of diagonal bands, the lattice was the first basic component the artist used in his watercolors. Nearly forty years later, in his wittily titled series, “Remember That Primitive Cottage Feeling� (2009), Tillyer returns to an unadorned, rudimentary vocabulary with the freedom of someone who has practiced his craft for many years, and, from the perspective that time offers him, gazes at his own artistic origins without the slightest hint of sentimentality or nostalgia. Wide diagonal bands of largely cool, luminous colors become both an incomplete barrier and a gateway to an incomplete red square or, in one case, a complete floating parallelogram. The vocabulary is completely abstract. And yet, we feel as if these layers of luminous bands are palpable, unnamable things. Form and light, and substance and insubstantiality, are interchangeable. We live in porous world made of light, dust, and water. No contemporary artist has stated this incontrovertible fact so eloquently and directly. Instead of defining structures to see, the artist has defined structures of seeing. It seems moot to ask whether the slanting bands of color are the side of a house, a fence, or falling shafts of light. Nature and the man-made have become inseparable in ways that are joyous and disquieting.
XI. William Tillyer, Remember that Primitive Cottage Feeling 13 2009, Watercolour on paper
The Mulgrave Watercolours 2019 Watercolour on Windsor & Newton paper Series: The Mulgrave Watercolours 77.5 x 57.2 cm (30 1/2 x 22 1/2 ins)
Reflections on the Esk The Mulgrave Watercolours 2019 Watercolour on perforated Arches paper Series: The Mulgrave Watercolours 58.4 x 58.4 cms (23 x 23 ins
Englishman's Bay 2003
Watercolour on paper in four sections
Fragment 2015 Watercolour on paper 42 x 42 cms (16 1/2x 16 1/2 ins) (mount size) 21 x 24 cms (8 1/4 x 9 1/2 ins) (paper size)
Fragment 2015 Watercolour on paper 42 x 42 cms (16 1/2x 16 1/2 ins) (mount size) 18 x 21 cms (7 1/8 x 8 1/4 ins) (paper size)
Fragment 2015 Watercolour on paper 42 x 42 cms (16 1/2x 16 1/2 ins) (mount size) 21 x 23 cms (8 1/4 x 9 1/16 ins) (paper size)
House and Garden and Pool 1972 Watercolour on paper 20 x 28 cms (7 3/4 x 11 ins)
Verona 1 1974 Watercolour on paper
Esk Bridge 7 1980 Watercolour on paper 66 x 49.5 cms (26 x 19 1/2 ins)
Hautes-Alpes 1 1983 Watercolour on paper Series: The Grand Tour Watercolours
Palm Trees Near Antibes 1 1983 Watercolour on paper 76.2 x 55.9 cms (30 x 22 ins)
Mill Wood North Yorkshire 1986-1987 Watercolour on paper Series: The English Watercolour Series
Near Salisbury 1985 Watercolour on paper Series: The English Watercolour Series
Proscenium Vase 1993 Watercolour on paper 76.2 X 55.9 CMS (30 X 22 INS)
Fallingwater Variation 26 1993 Watercolour on paper Series: The Fallingwater Variation Series
The Bedford Hills (6/10) Perforated Watercolours 1 2001 Watercolour and torn Armand mill hand made paper
The Age of Anxiety / The Kerry Sunset Watercolours 2001 Watercolour on Arches Aquarelle Series: The Kerry watercolours
Air Wind Light Water. The Fall, Cape Cod 20 2009 Watercolour on paper (22 x 29 3/4 ins)
Falling Sky Dropping Fatness on the Earth 2012 Watercolour on paper Series: Falling Sky Dropping Fatness on the Earth Series
The Watering Place 2013 Watercolour on Arches paper Series: The Watering Place 57.2 x 76.8 cms (22 1/2 x 30 1/4 ins)
Hebrus 2015 Watercolour on Arches Aquarelle paper Series: Hebrus Series 76.2 x 57.2 cms (30 x 22 1/2 ins)
For A. O. / Articulations 2017 Watercolour on Arches paper Series of 26 57.8 x 55.2 cms (22 3/4 x 21 3/4 ins)
Reflections on the Esk The Mulgrave Watercolours 2019 Watercolour on perforated Arches paper Series: The Mulgrave Watercolours
Reflections on the Esk The Mulgrave Watercolours 2019 Watercolour on perforated Arches paper
The Corsham Iris 1/3 2019 Watercolour on Arches paper 76.5 x W57.8 cms (30 1/8 x 22 3/4 ins)
The Corsham Iris 2/3 Study Sheets 2019 Watercolour on Arches paper 76.5 x W57.8 cms (30 1/8 x 22 3/4 ins)
The Corsham Iris 3/3 2019 Watercolour on Arches paper 76.5 x W57.8 cms (30 1/8 x 22 3/4 ins)
bernard jacobson gallery For further information, please contact mail@jacobsongallery.com tel: +44 (0)20 7734 3431
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