​Nobody is a collaboration between the acclaimed British artist, William Tillyer and Alice Oswald, widely regarded as the finest living British poet. The project is presented as part of a special year of books and exhibitions featuring the work of Tillyer in celebration of the artist’s 80th birthday in 2018.
A partnership between two art forms, Nobody is a unique crossover work - both a book and an exhibition of luminous watercolours. Created over 3 years and inspired by each other’s promptings and shared ideas, Nobody is a watery world from which Tillyer and Oswald gave expression to the shared belief that tension is the essence of form, or as Tillyer eloquently describes, ‘Not competing, but traveling side by side; a shared path.’.

Their theme is water, which they recreate in a collage of words and images; a rush of selves and other life forms where fluidity is given voice and form. The choice of watercolour is particularly apt, described by Oswald as ‘an absence – as if the thing depicted were already elsewhere and what’s left is merely a tidemark’. In Oswald, this quality is expressed in waves of language where the un-named characters assume the quality described by Oswald as ‘the weather’s or water’s leavings’.
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‘Nobody’ is an alias of Odysseus, one of his lost selves, adrift and unable to get home. Oswald’s words are his rhapsody, a circling shoal of sea voices which ends where Homer’s epic begins. Caught between The Odyssey and The Oresteia and not knowing either story’s conclusion, the poet goes on speaking surrounded by water. Perhaps he is only an alias of Odysseus, one of his lost selves, unable to get home?

This poem is a circling shoal of sea voices, inspired by Homer’s descriptions of the sea – ‘the bodiless or unbounded thing’ which ends at The Odyssey’s beginning whilst the paintings immerse us in a visionary experience of an elusive, almost abstract, lyrical and romantic world. Springing from Tillyer’s belief in the shared essence of all things, the paintings are a tangible accompaniment to Oswald’s poem, explored through paper, water, and pigment, resulting in a single dazzling work of words and watercolour.

Alice Oswald is the author of several renowned collections including Dart (2002), her evocation of the human history of the Devon river valley where she and her family live, and Memorial (2011) her ‘excavation’ of the Iliad where lyric is borne along in blood. Another long poem, Tithonus, was the centre-piece of her 2016 Griffin Prize winning collection, Falling Awake.
William Tillyer was born in Middlesborough and studied in London at the Slade School of Fine Art, before moving to Paris to study under Stanley William Hayter at the hugely influential Atelier 17. He has since become the most versatile British artist of his generation, the heir to Constable by way of Cézanne and Matisse.

ABOUT BERNARD JACOBSON GALLERY
Bernard Jacobson Gallery was founded in 1969 as a publisher and dealer in prints. Over nearly 50 years the gallery has exhibited many great British, American and European artists including: Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, Peter Lanyon, Robert Motherwell, Bruce McLean, Ben Nicholson, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, James Rosenquist, William Scott, Frank Stella, Pierre Soulages, William Tillyer, and Marc Vaux.

À Rebours (Against Nature) has been an enduring source of inspiration and fascination for William Tillyer from his earliest practice as an artist, representing the dynamic polarity of the natural versus the contrived - and good versus evil. The tension between these opposing sides is seen repeatedly in Tillyer’s work and perhaps is particularly evident in the use of metal grids in his landscape paintings.

This might seem at odds with an artist who is equally passionate about the naturalism of Constable but this contradiction is eloquently explained by the art historian, Norbert Lynton ‘Constable’s art involved hard-won and hard-worked artifice to achieve the effect of naturalness...Huysmans’s artifice is patent: ascribed to des Esseintes, it is the theme of his book’ (À Rebours) *. Whilst Tillyer is certainly alive to the beauty of the natural world, his attempts to portray it are always firmly rooted in an understanding that all art is artifice.

Themes from the novel have appeared in Tillyer’s paintings over many decades and the portfolio for this exhibition began life in 1974 with 61 prints produced over a period of 5 years. These prints are characterised by dazzling variety, both in technique and pictorial approach; Tillyer never appears circumscribed by working within the framework of the novel, rather it seems to release a particularly rich seam of invention and experimentation.
In creating this folio Tillyer deploys an array of intaglio techniques including etching, dry point, engraving, aquatint and copper plate, whilst visually they range from the expressionistic use of colour to monochrome and from loose and atmospheric mark-making to precise and detailed representation. This includes the pop-like coloured lines used to render the female curves of The Acrobat, to the dark and gothic cross-hatching employed to atmospheric effect in The Duc de Esseintes Addresses his Servants.

Overall, one is left with an impression of richness and an energetic dialogue with the text, rather than a literal interpretation; the wonderfully confected world of À Rebours re-imagined by Tillyer retains all the power of the original to unsettle and provoke, even after a span of many decades from its first conception.