William Tillyer: Watercolours

Ranging from abstracted mediations on the organic flow of materials to large bodies of work made in response to William Tillyer’s extensive travels (from Sweden to Australia; a European Grand Tour to the American West; the artist’s native Yorkshire to the coast of County Kerry), this show encompasses the wide-ranging interests that characterise the artist’s approach in all media. In isolating his watercolour practice, however, the show highlights the specific vitality which Tillyer has brought to a historic tradition. As Peter Fuller observed, ‘in the medium of watercolours, and perhaps only in watercolours – the great cry of the romantic aesthetic (i.e. Truth to Nature), and the great cry of emergent Modernism (i.e. Truth to Materials) were, in fact, one and the same…I think it is this unique priority of this elusive medium that Tillyer seems to have understood so fully’.

The exhibition will trace the development of Tillyer’s approach from the tight luminescent lattices of the early 1970s to the free-flowing washes of more recent years. Throughout, as Fuller had it, ‘Tillyer’s watercolours invite us to share with him a tentative and tremulous sensation of physical and spiritual oneness with the natural world’.

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