William Tillyer valuation
Yorkshire landscape painter who keeps rebuilding what a painting physically is.
William Tillyer was born at Middlesbrough in 1938 and studied at the Slade, and has spent sixty years painting the landscape of the North York Moors while systematically dismantling the object it is painted on.
What a work by William Tillyer is worth
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Bio
William Tillyer was born at Middlesbrough in 1938 and studied at the Slade, and has spent sixty years painting the landscape of the North York Moors while systematically dismantling the object it is painted on. He has worked on wire mesh, on trellis, on shaped and multi-panel supports, on paper hung loose, and in constructions where the picture is a grid with holes in it and the wall shows through — so that a hedgerow or a rainstorm is delivered by something that behaves like a fence or a window. Watercolour and printmaking have run alongside the painting throughout.
A British market, respected among painters and quieter at auction than the standing of the work would suggest. Large paintings and constructions lead; the mesh and trellis works are the signature pieces and are physically vulnerable, since the support is part of the image and distortion or corrosion of the mesh cannot be corrected without altering the work. Watercolours are numerous and are among the best things he does. Tillyer has a very substantial printed output in etching, aquatint and screenprint from the 1970s onwards.
Middlesbrough, Atelier 17 and Bernard Jacobson
Tillyer studied at Middlesbrough College of Art from 1956 to 1959 and then at the Slade, and in 1959 two of his paintings were selected for the Young Contemporaries. After the Slade a French government scholarship took him to Atelier 17 in Paris to study under Stanley William Hayter. He made his first reputation as a printmaker, with international acclaim at the Kraków print biennale in 1968.
Bernard Jacobson has been his dealer since 1969. His first major exhibition, of 33 etchings, was at the Arnolfini in Bristol in 1970, and the Serpentine's print gallery showed 26 etchings in 1971. The first mesh paintings came in the mid-1970s, and the Mesh Works of 1979 and 1980 did away with canvas altogether.
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