William Tillyer

(British, born 1938)

William Tillyer is a contemporary British artist known for his abstract watercolors and oil paintings based on works by John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, and Nicolas Poussin. “The real crux of the problem is that painting as an activity has become marginalized,” he has explained. “My thinking is to find room for its continued expansion, I’m particularly interested in tracking the change in painting in terms of surface, to one of physicality; a conversation between illusion and reality.” Born in 1938 in Middlesbrough, United Kingdom, he went on to study under William Coldstream at the Slade School of Art in London during the early 1960s. Following his time at the Slade, Tillyer took up a French Government Scholarship to study gravure under Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17 in Paris. Upon returning to England, the artist began making experimental work that raised questions about the relationship of art to the world. Tillyer currently lives in his hometown of Middelsbrough, United Kingdom. Today, his works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Fort Worth Art Museum in Texas, among others.