Better late then never...ever!
Hello. I’m Tim Willcox - an abstract mixed-media painter, collage tinkerer, and former design & advertising-industry refugee now happily on a journey to discover colour, texture, and form.
I make expressive abstract paintings and collages that explore new and exciting territories for me personally. I passionately believe art should question and stimulate, push forward and make us inquisitive. It should be bound by very few rules, challenge anything stated as fact, and - where possible - turn heads and raise eyebrows.
After more than two decades in the ad industry, I eventually worked myself into a gibbering, creatively dehydrated husk. I quite literally ran out of steam and decided enough was enough. It was time to swap midnight-oil-burning deadlines for the sheer joy of daylight hours (my vitamin D levels are now off the chart!) and rediscover the simple pleasure of getting paint under my fingernails (and occasionally some on the canvas). I’d always loved painting, but it had to take a back seat after leaving art college in 1981.
So now I’m in. Fully committed. No more dabbling, picking it up and putting it down again. I’ve got time on my hands, and I’m not going to waste it. I’ve dabbled long enough - now I get to do it properly: no stress, no deadlines, no needy clients. Just me, a bunch of ideas for visual adventures, and a set of tools to bring them to life on a surface of my choosing.
I’ve yet to fully find my voice (though I’m having immense fun looking), and my work currently leans towards the quirky, tongue-in-cheek, and playful. To many, it may feel a touch irreverent - occasionally taking a jab at the world and its absurdities. I like to think of it as serious but fun : rooted in ideas that matter, but never afraid to push forward and smudge the edges.
I work across a range of surfaces - canvas, plywood, board, paper, and bursting-at-the-seams sketchbooks and scrapbooks - whatever feels right on the day, because each reacts differently to the physical process. I’ve never been a gentle painter. I like to attack the surface, layer on texture, scrape it back, build it up again. My tools are many and varied: brushes, sticks, stencils and stamps, scraps of card, fingers, and a growing array of found objects that make excellent marks - often purely by accident. If it makes a good mark, I’ll use it: acrylics, oils, inks, pastels, pencils, charcoal, collage, spray paint, or whatever’s lying about the studio that looks promising. I love mixing materials that shouldn’t really belong together and somehow coaxing them into getting along.
Each painting starts as a conversation between me and the surface. I usually have a vague notion of what I’m trying to say - a shape, a feeling, a thought - but once the paint starts to flow, instinct takes over. I follow the process wherever it leads: sometimes to order, often to chaos, but always somewhere interesting and open-ended.
At heart, I’m just curious - about colour, marks, texture, and how far I can push an idea before it collapses or becomes something completely new. Bob Ross (he of the soothing voice and kitchen-scourer hairdo) once said he “doesn’t make mistakes, just happy accidents.” That feels about right, and it’s what keeps me turning up in my compact and bijou studio (with excellent light): the sheer joy of not quite knowing what’s going to happen next, keeping things thought-provoking, and leaving enough rough edges to show the work was made by human hands. Old-fashioned, I know - but there you go.
Thank you for taking the time to browse - I hope you enjoy exploring my work.
