Born in Lancashire, Tim Woolcock attended Arnold School in Blackpool before studying Art and Philosophy at Roehampton, University of London. He taught in London from 1974 to 1986, and ran a highly successful framing business, before returning to painting in the late 1990s. Woolcock’s worked gained immediate popularity among collectors and he resumed his career as an artist in 1999.

Woolcock was encouraged to paint from an early age and paid regular visits to the Grundy Art Gallery in Blackpool as a teenager. Influenced by artists prominent in the 1950s, in particular by members of the St Ives School such as William Scott and Ben Nicholson, his work features strong pigments and fractured geometric forms that is balanced, characteristically, by an equally refined and delicate use of colour. Writing in The Times in 2013, Joanna Pitman favourably described Woolcock as ‘one of our finest modern British colourists’.

Woolcock also paints landscapes influenced by the work of Paul Nash and Helen Dunbar. He is fascinated by the contrast between the countryside of Ireland and England and, more locally, between the coasts of Lancashire and Cornwall, where his family originates. Zen writers and traditions, an influence reflected in the simplicity of his abstractions and the evocative nature of his landscapes, also inspire his work.