Neural Inspirations
Tokyo-based painter and scientist Wilf Tilley explains how his twin passions inform his artworks.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor of his one-room art studio in Aoyama, Wilf Tilley slips on a pair of new cotton gloves as white as his lustrous crop of hair and swirls paintbrushes in old tomato cans filled with cleaning fluid.
A small table in the room is neatly arranged with paint mix, Staedtler charcoal pencils and cutting knives. The 68-year-old says he’s able to paint on the floor for up to eight hours.
“I’ve been in Japan too long,” says Tilley, who exhibits a series of his portraits at the Frederick Harris Gallery this month.
The Brit, whose real name is Michael Miller, assumed his artistic alias (it’s a combination of his parents’ names) 40 years ago, when he organized politically charged art exhibitions as a student at the Royal College of Art in London.
Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s famous anatomical drawings and conversations with a friend in the neuroscience field, Tilley took a neurology course through the Open University, which led to research at Oxford University. For his research project, he attempted to replicate Leonardo’s successful experiment to study the brain’s ventricular cavities by injecting hot wax into an ox’s brain.
“I set it all up, and the [mad cow disease] scare started, and you couldn’t get any brain material,” says Tilley. “The interest was really in [Leonardo’s] technique for visualization.”
A two-year medical research fellowship brought Tilley to Kobe 25 years ago, and a subsequent job kept him there until he moved to Tokyo a decade ago. Now that his daughter is grown-up, Tilley, who lectures in neuroscience at the University of Tokyo, says he can refocus his energy on art.
“In science, you are constantly pushing forward to gain new knowledge by extending the human senses,” says Tilley, whose shelves are lined with titles ranging from the Oxford Companion to Medicine to Jenõ Barcsay’s Anatomy for the Artist. “I didn’t see any reason why art can’t do that as well.”
Tilley’s early work focused on conceptual models, what he calls “faux medical models.” One example, hanging on Tilley’s studio wall, is a replica of the part of the brain referred to as the “Elephant Man” homunculus.
Today, the renaissance man is heavily influenced by the Renaissance masters. Two of his more potent works are recreations of the 16th-century artists Quinten Massys and Lucas Cranach the Elder.
But he refuses to conform to one style, dabbling in satire, with his caricatures of modern political leaders, as well as realism, illustrated in his reinterpretations of hand-colored photos from 1930s Asia.
“Obsessed” with texture, Tilley picks up a painting of a Singaporean girl and gleefully runs his finger over the rough veneer. Another painting is of his daughter cradling one of her newborn triplets. He flips it sideways, revealing a surface as smooth as ceramic tile.
“Science is an experimental discipline,” he says. “Painting is also experimental. I can use any technique I like, as long as the image is convincing in the end.”
Words: Nick Narigon
Image: Kayo Yamawaki
Gallery Reception
Nov 28 | 6:30–8pm
