yves tilly b. 1960
It wasn’t until a little later that I really got into art—around the age of 24. When I arrived in Paris, I enrolled in the City of Paris art workshops to study drawing. For 124 francs a year, I had access to a class with a live model. That’s where I met real artists for the first time. They called me “the working-class guy,” but it was all in good fun.
What followed was a bit of a jumble. From a bike trip with an accordion to a several-year stint in Ivory Coast, carrying in my luggage the plans for a marvelous schooner… I’d regularly leave behind piles of wood—promises of sculptures, very few of which would ever see the light of day.
Back in Brittany, a period of restoring old buildings began, along with major changes, because in the year 2000 I married Judith. We opened a carpentry shop that did well but literally consumed us."
Until one day, exhausted, we decided to close the shop for a year to set off backpacking through South America. Back home, the rest we’d gotten from the trip had reignited that long-buried desire to make art a way of life. The time had come to get started. That was 10 years ago. Since then, I’ve been sculpting and drawing. Every now and then, I sail on other people’s boats to get out on the water a bit.