Thornton Willis

While surfing the Web recently, I came across a site with work by the painter Thornton Willis. Willis was an old friend, but I had not seen him since 1986, and the last time I had seen him before that was in 1968. He was my mentor back then. It was my senior year in college and his first year as a teacher. We shared a studio that year, and he taught me things about painting ľ mostly by example ľ that I had never imagined, instilling in me a love for the purity of paint with its variety of surface qualities.

Willis left our little college down South in the late ‘60s, after only one year on the faculty. He went to New York, where he fought to gain acceptance in the glitzy world of art galleries. Gradually he succeeded. By the early ‘80s he had become famous in a small way. His paintings were shown in major museums and galleries throughout the world, and articles were written about him in all of the major art magazines.

More than one critic referred to him as a painter’s painter and spoke of how younger artists looked up to him. He was admired for the purity of his work. His paintings consisted of simple shapes in often-brilliant colors. His forms were minimalist: stripes or bands of color in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, a single, monumental wedge shape in the mid-‘70s, zigzags in the early ‘80s and rectangular grids after that. Stylistically his paintings synthesized the formal elements of the Russian Constructivists, Piet Mondrian and early Frank Stella with the intense and sloppy paint application of Abstract Expressionism.

In the late ‘80s, Willis almost vanished from the art scene. It’s a fickle scene, and for no apparent reason he fell out of favor. His name quit showing up in the art magazines. I lost contact with him and did not see anything about him in print for 10 years. But when I found his Web site, I discovered that he had never given up and that his latest paintings are his strongest yet.

In his latest paintings, his rectangular grids have morphed into architectonic constructions of triangular shapes that create the illusion of pushing out from the surface of the canvas. These paintings are weighty with volume.

In many ways, the history of twentieth century painting was a history of the depiction of space on a two-dimensional surface. The Renaissance tradition of paintings with illusions of deep space through perspective gave way at the beginning of the twentieth century to Cubistic planes, which gave way to flat surfaces with no depth, which was supplanted by a new kind of space that expands visually beyond the flat surface. Frank Stella, the master of this new kind of expansionist space, traces it back, ironically perhaps, to a Renaissance painter, Carravagio.[1]

I know that Willis is a great admirer of Stella, but I have no way of knowing whether or not his more expansive space is a direct result of studying Stella’s ideas.

Willis’s formal structures are a mixture of careful planning and intuition. His color schemes are very thoughtful in that each painting is uniform in either intensity or value. No one could have chosen colors more carefully, yet his painting method implies that his choices were arrived at intuitively in process rather than through calculation, as if through trial and error he adjusted his colors until he finally got them just right. And in the best Abstract-Expressionist tradition, his brushstrokes leave a visual record of his struggles as he layers, wipes out and re-paints. Like the scars and wrinkles that lend character to an old man’s face, the rough, viscous and layered surface of Willis’s paintings speak of a lifetime love affair with paint and canvas from a man who continues to be a painter’s painter.

Visit Thornton Willis's website (opens in separate window)

[1] Stella’s complicated theories of the use of space in painting are explained in his book Working Space.