The Brooklyn Rail

I first met Thornton when I was a senior in high school and he was a senior at the University of Southern Mississippi (Mississippi Southern College at the time). Although still in high school, I hung out as much as I could in the Art Department at Southern, talking to the older art students and looking at their work. Thornton had some paintings hanging in a hallway that were unlike anything I had ever seen, simple abstract paintings that had a direct and powerful effect on me. I introduced myself. Sometime after that I invited him to come to my house and see some of my paintings. He came over and looked at my paintings and said he liked them, which was very encouraging.

Thornton graduated and went to grad school in Alabama, and I dropped out for two years. The next time I saw him, I was back at USM, a senior, and he came back as a teacher. I wasn’t in any of his classes because he taught freshmen. At the time I was fed up with the Art Department. The main drawing and painting teacher was nice but old fashioned. Most of the students made boring art. But Thornton got me excited about art again. He talked with excitement about Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, and a host of young painters I was barely aware of. His excitement rubbed off on me.

My parents owned a sporting goods store downtown, and there was a big empty loft upstairs. Thornton and I took over the loft and made it our studio for a year. In order to move his paintings from the temporary studio he had rented when he first came to town, we loaded some into my car and some into his tiny, baby blue convertible Triumph sports car. Just imagine eight to ten-foot paintings in a tiny sports car.

We talked about rigging up some kind of rope and pully for loading and unloading paintings through an upstairs window, but never did it.

Once ensconced into the loft, he started working on oddly shaped paintings. I remember the struggle to stretch canvas over a particularly complex stretcher. While working on it he said, “I love paint. I love the smell of it.”

Working side-by-side with him for that entire school year was transformative for me.

After he went to New York, I followed his career as best I could, looking for news about him every month in Art News and the other art magazines. I was really glad that my wife Gabi and I got to visit with him and meet his wife Vered when we went to NYC to visit her mother. I remember that he and I visited art galleries in SoHo. We saw a Basquiat show. Neither of us had seen his paintings before. We both liked them but for different reasons. He thought his paintings looked like de Koonings, and I didn’t.