Bundanoon
New South Wales based artist Tillian Reeves
‘Art is the living water that sustains me.
A fountain of inspiration suddenly rises and like the rainbow in falling rain, paintings appear.’
Prize Finalist
Artworks: 53
Tillian is a contemporary Australian artist whose practice explores the poetics of place, sacred landscape, and the mythic imagination. Raised between the coastal wilds of Whale Beach and the English countryside of his mother’s heritage, his formative years were marked by a deep sensitivity to nature and an enduring interest in invisible dimensions of experience.
Educated at Alexander Mackie College of Advanced Education—then one of Sydney’s most progressive art institutions—Tillian trained in painting, filmmaking, and photography. He later completed a Master of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong, focusing on sacred landscape as a generative force in visual language. He subsequently taught visual arts at a Steiner high school where he introduced ‘Vision Quest’ camps into the adolescent curriculum—fostering creativity through immersion in nature and mythic process. In 2008, answering once more the call of the sea, he set sail along Australia’s east coast, much of the time as a solo sailor. Since returning in 2013 he has painted full-time from his home studio in Bundanoon, where he is developing an independent gallery and sculpture garden embedded in the bush.
Often created in situ, his large-scale friezes and layered abstract works respond directly to the elemental presence of landscape—its textures, atmospheres, and spiritual charge. Drawing on modernist lineage while engaging with Indigenous desert painting, Indian devotional motifs, and medieval iconography, Tillian composes visual meditations that hover between the material and the symbolic. Through a process he calls “conscious dreaming,” glyphs and forms arise spontaneously, as if summoned by the land itself.
For Tillian, painting is both ritual and refuge: “Art is the living water that sustains me,” he writes. “If these works awaken a sense of awe or help re-tune someone to the natural world, they have done their work.”
Tillian has held five solo exhibitions and participated in numerous group shows, in Australia and abroad. His art features in private collections in Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Germany, France, the UK and America. Notable solo exhibitions include: ‘Living Waters’ (1999, Albert Street Gallery’ Mittagong); ‘The Enclosed Space’ (2001, UOW Gallery, Wollongong; ‘The Happening of Place’ (2018, Moss Vale Civic Centre), ‘Illuminations’ (2019, Milk Factory Gallery, Bowral), and ‘Affinity of Place’ (2022, SHAC Gallery, Robertson). His work continues to evolve as an ongoing dialogue with land, light, memory, and meaning.
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