William Tillyer
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William Tillyer[1] (born 1938 in Middlesbrough, North Yorkshire) is a British artist.
He studied art in his home town from 1956-9, moving south to London for the 1960s and the Slade School of Art.
It was there where he encountered William Coldstream among others.
"...Tillyer's training involved him in all the art-school exercises of those days, from life drawing ardently pursued to the conventionalized 'comp, called for by the state examiners in London. It was all grist to his mill at first, but when he was at the Slade Tillyer felt himself more or less isolated, a young artist now needing to find his own way, little touched by the well-intentioned bits of tuition he got from Claude Rogers and one or two others. More memorable were the classic films he was introduced to by the Slade's new film department, and sometimes the routine but informative lectures on art history given by the late Leo Ettlinger (though Tillyer also recalls waking with a start, to find himself alone in a deserted lecture room)."
"...Tillyer likes to speak of the classical and the Romantic in his work, referring to his coupling of man's and nature's forms. He would agree, though, that the duality is partly insubstantial: human beings are nature and their actions are natural. Nature makes hard-edge forms, often of perfect geometry, as well as organic forms. Tillyer's lattice can be seen as an intellectual construct, and it can also be seen as an efficient method for recording attributed to some of the flowers. In other words the complementarities Tillyer explores are not oppositions so much as exchanges in a mutually reinforcing dialogue - not unlike that which led the eighteenth-century landowner to develop his ground in a natural, Claude-based style while setting a chiselled Georgian house into it..."
Taken from "William Tillyer, The Westwood Paintings"
