TILLYER, William

‘The Watering Place II’ by William Tillyer

Description

Inkjet by William Tillyer printed on Somerset Photo paper. Published by Bernard Jacobson Gallery, 2015. From a signed and numbered edition of 100 copies. In excellent condition.

Sheet size   570 x 765mm   (22x 30  inches  approx)
WT15178

Item details

William Tillyer is a celebrated British painter and watercolorist, whose work has been shown frequently in London and New York since the 1970s. He began to make radically experimental work, which raised questions about the relationship of art to the world, and of man to nature. Tillyer’s series The Watering Place takes its name from the Rubens masterpiece in the collection of the National Gallery, London (1615-22). This work was also the inspiration for a painting of the same name by the English artist Thomas Gainsborough (before 1777) and later for John Constable’s The Hay Wain (1821), both paintings also in the collection of the National Gallery, London. This series conveys Tillyer’s deep engagement with painting, particularly abstraction and the tradition of landscape painting. It also reveals the undiminished ambition with which the artist continues to bring fresh insight to the underlying obsessions of his experimental oeuvre; his investigations into the nature of the art object and its role in the world; and his search for materials and techniques not usually associated with painting.
In The Watering Place there is a fiery sky shot through with blue and green swirls, clouds and veils, and two glowing, orange orbs. In their color and surface, the paintings reference the North Yorkshire moors where the artist has lived for most of his life. The landscape around him has long been a source of inspiration, which he first explored in an early student piece, entitled The Vortex, 1958, depicting a “vortex of sky above the moors’.