New Bedford artist/fisherman Brian Tillett wants to make you look...

If there were an award for endurance during the creation of art, Brian Tillett surely would have earned it during the first SUPERFLAT mural festival last August in New Bedford.

Beginning early in the week and continuing through the public art festival, through the 3rd EyE Open on Saturday and for days after, through the haze and humidity in temperatures reaching the 90s, Brian Tillett rose each morning, noon and night like a colossus of street art into the sky, on a lift along the back wall of the Bristol Community College building in downtown New Bedford, to execute his ambitious Basquiat wall mural.

It was a huge undertaking — requiring vision, stamina and total commitment.

And Brian Tillett embellished those virtues at sea.

For in addition to being an artist of singular focus, Tillett is also a commercial fisherman — a scalloper, to be precise.

“Sweating it out is not uncommon for me,” he says.

This is an artist who feels the push and pull of the tides — indeed, that ebb and flow help define him.

Harsh days and long hours on the Atlantic may have imbued Brian Tillett with an extraordinary degree of fortitude, but the experience also represents a voyage away from the deep feeling he has for his art and the bottomless need he feels to create it. It’s a constant longing while out on the water — which only deepens his determination to do more when back on land.

A vehicle to do just that presented itself to Tillett in late 2017 and throughout 2018; he was one of the first artists to become a member of the SUPERFLAT team.

SUPERFLAT is both an outlet and a motivating factor for creating art, he says, and credits the group with helping to make public art more popular in New Bedford.

“Having the platform to generate is huge for a city,” he notes. “Public art creates an interaction a blank wall wouldn’t make,” with a viewer, he says — and stimulates a progressive, positive way of looking at New Bedford in the mind’s eye.

When he paints a wall, he feels that, “just the fact that you looked means, I got you! That’s huge; that’s important.” Especially for kids seeing it. He continues, “If I can connect with just one kid and change his/her trajectory, I’ve succeeded. Just one!”

There have been many more than “just one” kid to marvel at Tillett’s work. There were a couple hundred during the 3rd EyE Open, when they saw the artist laboring all day long to apply multiple images of the legendary artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat to that side of the BCC building. And, in a bit of serendipity, he was applying some final touches weeks later when students from Tabor Academy came to downtown New Bedford for an arts and culture tour.

On that tour, one of the students recognized Tillett as something else — the fisherman he is, too.

Turns out a family member owns one of the boats which brings him out to sea, and to the other endeavor which defines him as a person.

Tillett grew up in a fishing family. His father and uncle fished, so he’s accustomed to the life.

“You miss things,” he says. Things like birthdays and other special family events when meeting the demands of a fishing life. Yet, he understands it’s part of the job, and says that the good living he makes from being a scalloper means he never has to worry about being able to afford plenty of paint for his walls.

He needs a lot of it, because Tillett’s canvases are grand in scale and execution. What he misses most when out fishing is the time he’s unable to devote to his art.

So, he plots his future work in his imagination when out at sea. He fishes all year long, on two different boats and has been doing so for eight years now.

But he’s been making art since he was little, he says, and is thus an artist who is a fisherman, not the other way around.

Born in New Bedford, raised in Fairhaven, and now a city resident again, Tillett was influenced by cousins who practiced legit graffiti, but has forged his own path as an artist.

The bulk of his work has been passed on to friends and family. Much of that would consist of portraits of iconic artists and musicians, as processed through Tillett’s unique perspective.

It’s also the aesthetic you’ll find in his art today — the Basquiat mural as well as the Dali mural on the Hatch Street Studios building in the north end of New Bedford. A version of that image was created live during SUPERFLAT’s debut last May, and remains on view at the Co-Creative Center.

Just around the corner and up William Street, Tillett maintains a studio in the Cummings Building. It’s there he returns to when he reaches land after a fishing voyage — and where he pushes against the boundaries of his art.

“If you’re comfortable with your artwork, you’re not trying hard enough,” he says.

Yes — he admits to being a perfectionist. He looked at the Basquiat mural when the painting was done — which means when the lift that brought him up onto the side of the building had to be returned — and announces that there were “parts of it I couldn’t stand. But all in all, it’s pretty cool.”

Fans would certainly agree. And you know what?

He Made you look.

Steven Froias blogs for the coworking facility, Groundwork! at NewBedfordCoworking.com. Email: StevenFroias@gmail.com.

 Get the best of Coastin’ delivered to your inbox each week. Sign up for our weekly email newsletter by visiting myprofile.southcoasttoday.com.