Time has proven William Tillyer to be the most adventuresome painter of his generation. This is no small achievement. In a country known for its masters of landscape and light, and artists such as J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, and Samuel Palmer, Tillyer has extended that glorious tradition into new territory.
Tillyer has attained this by working on different supports, which enabled him to apply paint by various, unconventional means, as well as by bringing together abstraction and figuration in unlikely ways… …Landscape painting can transport the viewer to another world, to another time and place. Tillyer refuses to do continue this familiar trope for reasons that strike me as both aesthetic and ethical. In their use of metal mesh, wire, and paint, the artist reminds us that we too are made of changeable material, and that we too are vulnerable.” John Yau
Dr. Claudia Tobin on The Golden Striker
"The great engine of the wind and weather rolls in, stage right, making way for the cornfield described in shimmering lush gold paint. Strike is what this painting does, with monumental scale and dynamic form. Sky and earth meet in the churning blue and yellow sphere, which conjures the mechanical energy of a waterwheel or harvester...."
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John Yau on The Mulgrave Tensile Wire Works
"We know that we are looking at a partly painted, metal object, a landscape painting, and a geometric abstraction. No other contemporary artist can make an essentially unclassifiable work, which brings together these incommensurable possibilities..."
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