'The Helmsley Sky Studies 8A'
47.0 x 69.8cm

'The Flatford Chart 111 Nine Clouds'
72.8 x 92.7cm

Painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not a landscape be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but experiments?

"The sky is the source of light in Nature and it governs everything". John Constable

The concluding exhibition of our four-part William Tillyer Season will give first airing to the artist's latest body of work. Inspired by his return to North Yorkshire after a residency in Spain, and executed over the last eighteen months, the works see Tillyer revisit his enduring preoccupation with the English landscape. Following on the heels of our three retrospectives, the show reveals the undiminished ambition with which Tillyer continues to bring fresh insight to the underlying obsessions of his experimental oeuvre.

Centred upon a cloud study motif derived from John Constable's quasi-scientific attempts to map the construction of the skies, (as well as Tillyer's own long-running obsession with clouds as a symbol of interconnectivity within the material realm), these are works that demand to be seen in relation to the historic English landscape tradition even as they push towards a new conception of the genre.

Unfolding across both plane surface and Tillyer's trademark Open Surface lattices, the works see the artist push his control of paint as an allusive tool. In the plane surface Flatford Chart Paintings nine gesso panels, arranged in a chart structure, utilise the interrelation of differently diluted paints to recapture a sense of the material flux embodied in our skies. The viewer hovers between the panels and the accumulations of thicker and thinner paint - suspended in their mysterious interrelations, as they might be staring into the ethereal expanses of sky on a summer's day. The latticed Helmsley Sky Study pieces meanwhile see Tillyer control the movement of paint about and through a regular perforated lattice, suspended some two inches from a white background. Here the focus becomes the paint's conditioning as it weaves through the lattice. The viewer is caught up in the struggle of image and materials, paint and support, rationalising human form and motive, organic paint.

Throughout the works, therefore, Tillyer succeeds in creating new affinities between materials and subject matter, forcing reflection upon man's interrelation to nature, arts relation to the world. As Mel Gooding has observed, "they serve to remind us that the landscape is made by man and that great Nature itself is shaped by the symbolic imagination, known and recognised in our diverse picturings of it."

The exhibition reveals an artist in full-flight, building upon the accumulated experiences of half a century of committed practice to make works which drive towards a novel conception of the landscape tradition and painting in general.

A fully illustrated catalogue with a text by Ben Wiedel-Kaufmann, placing the new work within the context of Tillyer's wider oeuvre and evolving philosophy, will be released to coincide with the exhibition.

To coincide with Bernard Jacobson Gallery's retrospective devoted to William Tillyer's Watercolours, 21 Publishing are releasing this 271 page hardcover book surveying the Tillyer's watercolour production. With 224 full colour illustrations and a text by New York Poet and art writer John Yau.

"However beautiful they are, and many of them are extremely beautiful, almost painfully so, Tillyer’s watercolours never lead us away from the real world in favour of an Edenic vision. Rather, they bring us back to the here and now, to water and dirt, the basis of our existence… The artist’s re-envisioning of the characteristic qualities of watercolour is a unique contribution to both contemporary art and the tradition of English watercolour, as exemplified by artists such as John Sell Cotman, Alexander Cozens, John Constable and J.M.W. Turner." John Yau, 2010

ISBN: 978-1-901785-13-5

'Aaluminium Cloud 2002 ( acrylic paint / aluminium D handle on MDF)'
38.0 x 49.0cm

Bernard Jacobson is giving William Tillyer (born 1938) the compliment of a four-show season: prints, paintings, watercolours, new paintings. The second part, which defines 'paintings' very broadly, reveals him as a man of metal and cloud. The metal is seen at its purest in the radically geometric early piece 'Fifteen Draw Pulls' and at its best in the recent works in which the modernist grid is made literal in the form of steel lattices which serve as the ground for paint. The clouds range from painterly and etched evocations to a cabinet of pebbles transformed by the title 'Twelve Stacked Clouds'. The two come together in 'Aluminium Cloud', one of a series in which, to quote Tillyer 'the surfaces and structures of the support were to be as a piece of hardware, and as an obstacle to the paint as a protest'. All of which - and more, such as one painting so bursting with ambition it has to be held back with nylon straps - reveals just how ceaselessly enquiring and innovative Tillyer has been in his combinations of man-made and natural sources over the past 40-odd years.

'The Paintings - Private view'

'The Paintings - Private view'

To the uninitiated contact with William Tillyer's paintings can be de-stabilising. Pitting paint against support, formal allure against a wealth of conceptual allusions, industrial materials against organic flourishes of paint, they are objects that at once lure and retract - demanding the viewer negotiate between their disparate modes and multiple assertions. Tracing the evolution of Tillyer's practice across five decades, March's painting retrospective will reveal the diversity of Tillyer's means and the unity of his concerns, providing unrivalled insight into the career of one of the most thoroughly innovative artists of our times.

"Far from seeking to purge his painting of the imitations of nature, Tillyer seems to want to give expression to a new (and modern) vision of it. I believe this is why his art is attaining a new beauty and subtlety at a time when that of so many appears to have entered a fatal cul-de-sac." (Peter Fuller)

'Visitors inspect new work at the exhibition'

"...the gallery is devoting four months to showing Tillyer's work, beginning with his eclectic, diverse prints. Paintings - often unconventional in their materials and supports, including wire mesh, piano hinges, pebbles - watercolours and new work follow between March and June; all will demonstrate Tillyer as a serious, questing, stubbornly unfashionable painter, international in outlook and engaged above all in debate with the artificiality of art and its possibilities."

Jackie Wullschlager FT Weekend

William Tillyer The Prints

Bernard Jacobson Gallery 5th-2th Feb.

'Opeing The William Tillyer Season'

'Marie Walker (Printer), Bernard Jacobson and William Tillyer'

"One work in particular, quite a small one, seems to summarise the angle of attack. And that is the right metaphor for this retiring man's restless and ever-curious mind. It is right at the bottom of the stairs, in the second room of the show. Small, it hangs alone. You'll probably miss it. If you do, ask. The title is Twenty-Five Clouds, and it is a zinc etching on paper, made in 1968, that year of mock-revolutionary ferment."

'Bloworth Blue (acrylic on canvas with relief panel)'
91.4 x 106.7cm

William Tillyer's painting 'Bloworth Blue' can be seen in 'The Elemental North', an exhibition at Messums in London

"The Elemental North brings together paintings and works of art by a collection of remarkable individuals, each working in relative artistic isolation in the north of England and determined to push the boundaries of their art, to develop their own personal visual language."

'working on new etchings 2009'

'New Etchings - first proof 2010'

Celebrating William Tillyer and Bernard Jacobson's long-running working partnership, Spring 2010's four-part exhibition series will begin with a look at Tillyer's extensive printed output. In the forty years since the artist first visited Jacobson at his Mount Street print gallery, the latter has published close to two hundred editions of his work. The cross-section of works on display exemplify the fruits of such commitment - establishing Tillyer as one of the most constantly innovative print-makers working today.