Tim Woolcock

British, born 1952

Tim Woolcock, (born 1952 in Lancashire, England) is a British painter working in the tradition of the 1950s. Woolcock’s landscapes have often been described as mystical in their composition. He has always shown an affinity with Zen and this is reflected in most of his work. He mixes figurative elements with geometric patterns that combine to evoke a love of the landscape, the cosmos and the balance of the natural world.

Tim is particular about the quality of oil paints he uses and always paints on panel board. The striking, bright pigments used in his oil paintings are a distinctive marker in his work.

As a youngster, Tim spent holidays in Cornwall became inspired by the particular qualities of the Cornish landscape and its light. Though Tim’s paintings have an independent strength and clarity, his painting shows inspiration from Modern British painters and St Ives School artists, particularly Ben Nicholson, Patrick Heron and William Scott.

Tim comments that his work follows “in a lineage of English and Irish countryside painters; a long tradition stretching back even perhaps before Samuel Palmer and finishing up, at the moment, with the great illuminating works of David Hockney”. “The landscapes are generally an intuitive evocation of a place. I don’t do plein air painting. I’ve never gone out with my easel into the countryside. Some of them are landscapes of the mind. I do dream of landscape sometimes when I’m falling asleep. Places like Dorset, Wiltshire and Oxfordshire, if you go there in spring and summer, you can almost sit in a meadow and be transported back to the days of Samuel Palmer with shepherds and sheep.”

His works have been exhibited nationally and internationally and are in private and public collections worldwide and have sold at auction. In 2009 the Office of Public Works in Dublin, Ireland acquired one of his artworks for the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht.

In 2019 Tim Woolcock created and then donated the painting “Blue and Turquoise Amalgam” for the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital second floor atrium as he and members of his family have been patients in the hospital, and he wanted to return something in gratitude.