The Brooklyn Rail

I had the pleasure to get to know Thornton Willis on the occasion of his one-person show, A Painting Survey: Six Decades, held in 2022 at David Richard Gallery in an expansive space in uptown Manhattan. The scale and breadth and striking color of his paintings were a revelation to me. Yet what struck me most was their attitude of direct address. His kind of facile facility, a kind of plainspoken eloquence in form, color composition, and gesture tends to disarm any abstract prejudgment welling up in the viewer aforethought. Later, in a discussion we had in his studio in preparation for a Brooklyn Rail interview, I asked him what he was reading or if there were any particular authors who had inspired him. He mentioned The Courage to Be, a 1952 publication by the American philosopher Paul Tillich. I recorded the following excerpt for my notes and it now seems a very apt expression of both Thornton’s directness and his passing:

Absolute faith … is not a state which appears beside other states of the mind. It never is something separated and definite, an event which could be isolated and described.It is always a movement in, with, and under other states of the mind. It is the situation on the boundary of man's possibilities … One can become aware of it in the anxiety of fate and death when the traditional symbols, which enable men to stand the vicissitudes of fate and the horror of death have lost their power. When "providence" has become a superstition and "immortality" something imaginary, that which once was the power in these symbols can still be present and create the courage to be in spite of the experience of a chaotic world and a finite existence. The Stoic courage returns but not as the faith in universal reason. It returns as the absolute faith which says Yes to being without seeing anything concrete which could conquer the nonbeing in fate and death.¹

Paintings can be recognized as what Isabelle Graw has termed a vitalist projections.² As evidenced by his robustly sensate body of work Thornton seemed very conscious of this abiding notion. Yet from his earliest “Wall “ and “Slat” paintings, to his later “Lattice” series he seemed also deeply aware of the fact that an abstract painting basically expresses, “This could just as well not be, yet here it is.” His legacy is a body of works that will residually reclaim their vital inevitability due to the gravity with which Thornton understood how art, and abstract art in particular, maintains a universal faith in the razor’s edge between non-being and being.