Jean Tirilly - Early Life

Early Life

A self-taught artist, Tirilly began painting in 1986 at age 40. Prior to his genesis of the late 1980s, he lived a largely piecemeal life. He trained as a navy mechanic, enlisted in the Marine Nationale, and travelled the globe for a number of years aboard the Foch aircraft carrier. He then resettled in France, working odd jobs in Brittany while cultivating the elaborate visions of quotidian life in coastal Finistère that had always consumed him and would later constitute his central subject. During a childhood marked by the absence of television, Tirilly's exposure to the absurd and unusual emerged ironically out of his provincial milieu: travelling circuses, drunken bouts between village mendicants, delinquent apple thieves, village idiots, and the host of passers-by and external influences that coloured Breton village life through the second half of the twentieth century.