195

Robbie Tillotson

1949-1987

Untitled – Mates. Circa 1970s.

Oil, pastel, graphite, ballpoint pen on paper and mixed media on Masonite board
39 1/4 x 51 1/2 in. (99.7 x 130.8 cm.)

  • Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist.
    The estate of David del Tredici.

    Robbie Tillotson was born in the Piedmont, North Carolina, town of Denton. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Appalachian State University and an MFA from UNC Greensboro. In the 1970s, he moved to New York and began to build an art career, and his work was shown and collected widely during the late 1970s and the 1980s. His practice of using bold colors for the skin of his human subjects, not to mention for the flamboyantly patterned clothing they typically wear, is a mainstay in his practice. Tillotson based his drawings on people whom he knew or had observed closely, if only in photographs. But rather than being "true" to his subjects and trying to depict them naturalistically, he seems to have preferred transforming them into harlequins, as it were. The images are flat and loosely linear, and the faces and hands of the people in them are alternately red, orange, green, or other high-key hues, in most cases, as if their skin had been painted. The same kinds of colors are used to render the plaids, checks, stripes, grids, dot patterns, and curvilinear forms that decorate the clothing worn by these figures. Tillotson's self-acknowledged artistic influences -- German expressionism, Japanese woodcuts, and American folk painting -- are evident in his work, particularly in the stylization of his figures. The intricate, rhythmic patterns that are ubiquitous in his drawings indicate an affinity with the pattern-and-decoration movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, whose constituents worked abstractly. The whimsical and decorative aspects of Tillotson's individual and group portraits are countered by their psychological dimension, reflected in the postures of the figures; their physical relationships to one another; their sometimes veiled, mask-like faces and, especially, their eyes, typically outlined as if they're wearing heavy eyeliner. In the individual portraits, the figures tend to have a somber or thoughtful look, but in those that include two or more figures, the eyes often seem to reflect wariness, furtive calculation, and/or harsh judgment. These outrageously decked-out harlequins often seem to be simultaneously sizing us up and freezing us out, and in that respect, Tillotson's drawings stand as social commentaries of a sort, meditations on the psychological consequences of vanity, narcissism, and competitive social exclusivity. They're simultaneously playful and critical, appealing and vaguely unsettling. A member of the New York art scene and an actor of the 1970s-80s, he was friends with Andy Warhol and Alice Neel.
  • Condition:
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