His Art
The High Sierra paintings
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Tilden painted practically every peak, canyon, lake, and river in the High Sierra. During the epic winter of 1922 in the Lake Tahoe region, he completed a series of 100 paintings known as the “Northern California Alps” collection–one of his greatest legacies. He often led month-long expeditions into the high country with other artists, writers, and poets, and was known as the “Painter of the National Parks.”
The Countryside paintings
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Tilden painted thousands of countryside scenes in locations throughout Northern and Southern California and beyond, including Oregon, Arizona, Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York.
The Redwoods paintings
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Tilden’s passion for the redwoods spanned a lifetime. He painted hundreds of scenes of giant sequoias and coast redwoods, including: the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada, Marin County’s Muir Woods, Yosemite’s Mariposa Grove, the Armstrong Redwoods, Big Basin Redwoods, Calaveras Grove, Kings Canyon, Humboldt Redwoods, Sonoma County’s Russian River, and many more. He was active in Save the Redwoods League, a nonprofit organization founded in 1918 whose mission is to protect and restore the redwoods.
The Marine Art paintings
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Tilden briefly studied marine art—sea painting—under the tutelage of Russian born marine painter Herman Richard Dietz. But wildly expanding the genre, Tilden is one of the few artists in history to have painted beneath the sea in a custom-built diving bell, the “Submarine Studio.” He is said to have painted 300 underwater seascapes while submerged 150 feet in the Pacific Ocean. He submerged his diving bell at Point Reyes and Tomales Bay in Marin County, the Channel Islands in Southern California, and Bahia de Todos Santos and Punta Banda, in and around Ensenada, Baja, California. Tilden’s underwater paintings, and his resulting short story about his adventures in the Pacific, were reported extensively by Wide World Magazine and Sunset Magazine in 1926 and appeared in full page news articles syndicated across the country in 1927.
The Key of Red paintings
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While living in Mazatlan during the Mexican Revolution, Tilden developed a passion for painting landscapes in the red palette, inspired by Sinaloa sunsets and the Sierra Madre Mountains. In the 1920s in Hollywood, he became known as the “key of red” artist. He painted to music before live audiences, revealing his neurological condition known as synesthesia, the instinctive and synergistic relationship between color and music.