The Brooklyn Rail

At the death of my father, I received a tiny windfall, and decided it was time to leave Idaho, and pursue my dream of studying in New York. Enrolling at the Art Students League on the GI Bill, a group of fellow art students was established with whom to communicate. In our early discussions, one question that kept being asked was “What does it mean to be an artist, I mean, a real artist?”

Within the first six months of my arrival, rumors of a significant exhibition curated by Barbara Rose circulated at the League. This motivates a trip downtown to NYU’s Grey Art Gallery, to check out American Painting: the Eighties and attendance at the curator’s discussion. Visiting the show on multiple occasions a core group of standouts appear. Because of his dynamic simplicity, and innate color sense in the layering of paint, at the head of the list is Thornton Willis. His painting is singular due to its dynamic simplicity and innate color sense in the layering of paint. For Willis and others, inclusion in this controversial show will prove significant as the roster eventually serves as the basis for an updated index of New York painters.

As the decade plays out, sensibilities are grouped and labeled. Taking center stage in the establishment art press are: Pattern & Decoration, The Pictures Generation, Neo-Expressionism, the East Village scene, Trans-Avantgarde and Neo-Geo. A new species of celebrity artists and dealers are spotlighted, and a parallel wave in the market ripples to the margins. Despite the fickle twists and turns of painting trends, Thornton, like the enthusiastic golfer he was, kept his eye focused firmly on the aesthetic ball.

Warned by friends, critics and dealers that he should stick with his branded form of the “wedge,” Thornton nevertheless works through this series subsequently adding a number of other formats founded on his underlying elegant and spare sensibility. The “Grids,” “Zig-Zags,” “Cityscapes” “Biomorphic Cubism” “Steps” and “Latices” display a continuing desire for change and evolution without giving up the honesty of simplicity that make his work distinct. This is not a simplicity of the naïve, de-skilled or superficial; it’s a simplicity that is highly sophisticated and hard won; a single-minded distillation of intents and impulses rendered more pure and authentic through a process of reduction to essences.

At the end of the nineties, I’d bump into Thornton and his wife Vered at openings, sometimes his, sometimes others. We were drawn together by our mutual love of painting and painters. The Williamsburg art scene was taking off and Thornton was included in shows there as a respected senior member. Kate and I were invited to the Mercer Street loft for studio visits and dinners, and appreciated being introduced to core members of the SoHo creative community. This was the generation ahead of us, and a group that Thornton and Vered nurtured starting in the late sixties.

Befriending and supporting a group of like-minded artists was always an essential component of Thornton and Vered’s life. The directness and graciousness of Thornton’s generosity somehow reflected his painting practice. Straight to the point, not over-baring, superfluous, burdened with needless frills, or overthinking, he connected across generations of artists with both his personal relationship and painterly aesthetics. One manifestation of this was his eagerness to share personal nuggets of SoHo’s history, and insights into its evolution, with a new succession of artists.

By example and through his legacy, Thornton continues to answer the question that I’ve been pondering for nearly fifty years now, “What does it mean to be a real artist?”