Deborah Tilby | A Natural Observer

Deborah Tilby trains her discerning eye on the textures and tones of the world around her

By Norman Kolpas

Deborah Tilby, As the Sun Rises, oil, 12 x 12.

Deborah Tilby, As the Sun Rises, oil, 12 x 12.

This story was featured in the February 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art February 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

One day when she was about 17 years old, Deborah Tilby was sitting with a friend on a doorstep out in the countryside near Edmonton, Alberta. Across the street, she recalls, “beautiful long shadows were cast by the very oblique light” of the afternoon sun. “I commented on it, but my friend hadn’t noticed.”

That was the moment, Tilby ponders, when she began to realize she had a different way of regarding the world. “I’m always looking at the way shadows are falling, whether it’s the shadows of nails across a wall or of a chimney across the roof.” She pauses a moment before summing up the broader meaning of that outlook: “I’ve always been observing.”

Today, that observant nature—combined with abundant natural talent and with expertise gained largely through dedicated self-education—has earned the artist widespread admiration as a painter of landscapes and seascapes in a contemporary impressionistic style. Across the United States and in her native Canada, where she now works from her home in Victoria, British Columbia, her work has received numerous accolades from organizations and events including the National Oil & Acrylic Painters’ Society and Oil Painters of America. Despite such acclaim, however, she remains ever focused on her work. “I’m always, always striving,” she says, “to get better at what I’m doing.”

Tilby has felt inexorably driven to hone her aesthetic gifts ever since her mid-teens. The catalyst, she recounts, was her love of horses. “All of my friends had them, and I wanted one so desperately. So I started drawing horses. I drew them endlessly, going out into our neighbor’s field and sitting in the haystacks.” With a laugh, she admits that successfully drawing certain elements of her initial subject eluded her for a while: the horses’ hooves and muzzles. “So, in my drawings, they were always standing in tall grass and had hay in their mouths.” As her skills grew, she graduated from pencils to a drawing pen with assorted nibs and a bottle of ink, and she expanded her range to include such everyday subjects as the vacuum cleaner, her shoes, and her own hands and feet.

All those early efforts received unconditional support from her mother, who was very gifted at sewing, and her father, a mechanical engineer and builder who not only “designed houses and schools and machinery” but also created biographical portrait paintings, including one of John Diefenbaker, Canada’s Prime Minister from 1957 to 1963. “They just encouraged me and never criticized,” Tilby says. Her father even gave young Deborah her own art desk in a corner of the room he used as his home studio.

By contrast, Tilby received faint encouragement during her senior year at Memorial Composite High School in Stony Plain, Alberta. “The fashion in 1973 or ’74 was very much abstract expressionism,” she says. “But I wanted to teach myself to do figure drawing. My art teacher suggested that maybe I’d be better off taking a correspondence course. So I got kicked out of art class.”

That ultimately didn’t matter to the young self-starter. She’d already begun painting in watercolors and oils, finding both inspiration and instruction through the works of the great artists she admired. First among them was Andrew Wyeth, whose deeply observed realist paintings depicting the places and people of Chadds Ford, PA, and his family’s summer home in Maine won him worldwide renown. “I fell in love with his work,” she says of the images she saw primarily in art books, “and I learned a lot from copying every single one of his watercolors.”

Meanwhile, Tilby had moved to Vancouver and was continuing to refine her skills as a painter on evenings and weekends while working in art galleries. At the age of 21, she felt sure enough of her skills to start seeking work as an illustrator at advertising agencies, a decision that led to an unexpected turning point in her life and career. At the second agency she visited, the art director, who was British, suggested that she move to London and seek a job in an illustration studio there. “And I did, which is totally uncharacteristic of me, because I’m not that adventurous,” she says.

Within three weeks of her arrival in Great Britain, Tilby had found a flat to share and a job at Art Bag, a small studio in Covent Garden. She wound up staying in London for 14 years—working in the advertising world for four years and then dedicating herself to full-time painting in 1982, while also raising two children with her then-husband, English portraitist David Goatley.

London provided so much inspiration to her artistic eye. “As soon as I arrived, I knew I’d finally found what I really, really wanted to paint. I loved old buildings, with the textures of crumbling brick and stone. And I loved the chimneys, and the old doors and windows. Everywhere I turned, there was something to paint.” Each September before she and Goatley had children, she found still more subject matter when the couple “loaded up our motorbike and headed for Europe, traveling all over France and Spain and Italy.” Meanwhile, her works found representation with galleries in England, where she was admitted to the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours, and back home in Canada, to which she returned with her family in 1992.

Eventually, Tilby came to devote herself almost entirely to working in oil paints, as gallery owners more and more resisted selling works framed under glass. Oils also perfectly suited her growing love for plein-air painting, a passion she has now pursued for some 12 years with seven other local artists as the “Monday group,” setting up their portable easels each week in all kinds of weather at favorite spots along the shoreline and in the countryside surrounding Victoria. “It’s a bizarre thing to do, really,” she muses. “On a beautiful morning, we’ll be standing out on a beach and saying, ‘Aren’t we fortunate that this is our office and we get to do this for a living?’ Other times, it might be a miserable day and we say, ‘What compels us to do this?!’”

What drives Tilby, of course, is the challenging and satisfying process of observing and then transforming her impressions into exquisitely composed scenes, employing a palette of subtly modulated natural tones with a combination of both finely rendered details and more relaxed, often lively paint application that she likes to describe as “controlled looseness.” No two works, of course, follow the same creative path, but nonetheless she has arrived at a usually reliable process.

HIGH OAKS FARM, for example, began with a couple of plein-air studies the artist executed while standing on a lane between two horse paddocks. Back in the studio in her apartment, working on medium-density fiberboard that she had primed with three or four coats of gesso, she brushed in a tonal surface in pale, warm burnt sienna. “I thought that would look nice showing through all the greens,” she says. Then, with a stiff bristle brush, she “scumbled in all the darks for the trees and bushes coming toward the viewer, along with the shadows of the trees on the grass and the gap between the barn and shed.” Next, she “tucked in the hills behind the trees and blocked in all the greens for the fields” along with the blue-grays for the sky.

That gave her an overall idea of her composition. “Once I decided it was working,” she continues, “I started refining things.” That included creating a road disappearing through the distant trees, and adding small “blobs of paint” that deftly suggested fields beyond the trees.

Here Tilby pauses. “In every painting, there’s going to be one area that gives me grief,” she notes. In this particular one, it was the field in the foreground, a critical element that makes up more than half of the total surface in the bold composition. “I wanted it to feel loose, without any detail at the bottom,” she explains. Brisk brush strokes in pale yellow-green against that light sienna base conjure just the right effect.

The result goes a long way toward achieving an experience for the viewer, which Tilby says is one of her primary goals going forward. “I’ve heard someone say that paintings should work from three distances,” she explains. “First, from across the room, it should attract you with its simple graphic design.” Next, at the middle distance, the content of the painting—its subject—should excite the viewer. And finally, close up, “you should be excited by the way the painter has put the paint on.”

Not that Tilby herself, self-taught and self-motivated, would admit that this particular painting, or any of her recent works, fully achieves that ideal. “To me, growth comes through a series of plateaus,” she concludes. “I’ll be working away, thinking I’m doing okay, and then I’ll get dissatisfied. I’m never satisfied for very long because I’m always moving the goalposts.”

representation
Gallery 8, Salt Spring Island, BC, Canada; Peter Barker Fine Art, Uppingham, Rutland, UK.

This story was featured in the February 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art February 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

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