Tilly Woodward’s piece “Five Quail Eggs" can be found in the Brunnier Art Museum in Ames, Iowa. Photo by Anikka Trost.
"Tilly Woodward 's oil paintings are often mistaken for photographs because of their unbelievable detail. Tilly creates intimate glimpses at objects both man-made and from the natural world, sometimes a pairing of the two."
Her aesthetic is a tender attention to the particular, without lapsing into generalizations. She invites us, too, to be tenderly attentive, as best we can, to the small things in life, see their beauty, and find salvation in the attention.
My days are busier than when I was a child, but I still spend as much time as I can just looking closely at things. There is so much that is uncertain in the world. I find it a comfort to take time to see one thing clearly, or a part of one thing clearly, each day. I think of what I do as witnessing.
I love oil paint-- the way it smells, the way it moves, the way it captures color and light. I work on paper mounted to panel, because I like quality of the surface and the ease of moving from drawing to paintings. I love the idea of painting as the accumulation of small actions.
Beauty and connecting with beauty had saved me...Painting is evidence of thought, feeling, action—it’s leftover, an anchor of beauty and love.
Concrescence of Small Things
The philosopher Whitehead teaches that the universe unfolds moment by moment through acts of experience--the many becoming one, as each actual entity gathers the world into itself through subjective prehensions. It is a world composed not of inert things, but of feeling occasions, each taking account of others. Tilly Woodward’s art invites us to live into this metaphysical truth with our eyes and hearts wide open. She calls us to be attentive to the particularities of the many—to each small thing, whatever it is--on its own terms, for its own sake, in a spirit of compassionate presence. Her work is an invitation to practice prehension as an ethical and aesthetic discipline: not to dominate or define, but to notice, to feel-with, and to let the small become luminous.
The Prophetic Power of Small Things
There are many kinds of aesthetic: the sublime, the picturesque, the grotesque, the erotic. To these we might add, in relation to the art of Tilly Woodward, the tenderly attentive—an aesthetic rooted not in grandeur or shock, but in care. It arises from the patient act of looking with love. Her drawings do not shout; they lean in. They witness. They honor the fragile beauty of hands, faces, and memories that might otherwise be forgotten.
This is an aesthetic of presence—gentle, detailed, reverent. It does not abstract or generalize, but accompanies. In a world obsessed with spectacle and speed, the tenderly attentive offers a quiet resistance: it says, “Stay. Look. This matters.” It is, in its way, a sacred aesthetic. And perhaps, a prophetic one.
Ideologies are built on a sense of grandeur—on big ideas and their sublimity.
Nationalist, religious, and ethnic ideologies often draw power from the feeling of being part of something vast and exalted, something that transcends the ordinary. They stir pride, awe, and sometimes fear. But in their grandiosity, they can also become abstract, rigid, and inhumane—sacrificing persons for causes, erasing the small in the name of the great.
The art of small things can help rebuild our humanity.
In attending to what is fragile, particular, and near—the face of a child, a single flower, a moment of touch—we reawaken empathy. We return to presence. The small does not deny the grand, but it resists the tyranny of abstraction. It reminds us that life is always lived in the particular, not the slogan. This is the quiet work of healing. It is the work of art like Tilly Woodward’s.
This is an aesthetic of presence—gentle, detailed, reverent. It does not abstract or generalize, but accompanies. In a world obsessed with spectacle and speed, the tenderly attentive offers a quiet resistance: it says, “Stay. Look. This matters.” It is, in its way, a sacred aesthetic. And perhaps, a prophetic one.
Ideologies are built on a sense of grandeur—on big ideas and their sublimity.
Nationalist, religious, and ethnic ideologies often draw power from the feeling of being part of something vast and exalted, something that transcends the ordinary. They stir pride, awe, and sometimes fear. But in their grandiosity, they can also become abstract, rigid, and inhumane—sacrificing persons for causes, erasing the small in the name of the great.
The art of small things can help rebuild our humanity.
In attending to what is fragile, particular, and near—the face of a child, a single flower, a moment of touch—we reawaken empathy. We return to presence. The small does not deny the grand, but it resists the tyranny of abstraction. It reminds us that life is always lived in the particular, not the slogan. This is the quiet work of healing. It is the work of art like Tilly Woodward’s.