Thornton Willis

Interviews & Essays

Here at last in one book, is a comprehensive overview of the work of the influential lyrical abstractionist Thornton Willis. With an interview with the artist at its heart, the book also contains essays culled from past catalogues - some written especially for the book, plus over 170 full color images.

Lance Esplund on Willis

"With each new surprising series, Willis's paintings get better and better--more direct, dynamic, and hardboiled. And this powerful new grouping which evolved out of (earlier) interlocking geometries... reminds us that he works not just in series, but cyclically. Willis deals in the fusion of opposites: translucency and opacity..."

Joseph Mashek on Willis

"Willis encourages our concern with meaningfulness. Generally only caring human beings offer and accept feelings in this way. The paintings may not resemble human likenesses, but they nevertheless seem somehow to proffer human character in the abstract..."

Jed Perl on Willis

"Abstract painting is an abstraction of character or personality as much as it is and abstraction of nature. And what holds a gallerygoer is the best work that Robert Ryman and Thornton Willis have done recently is the excitement of watching artists who are interested in exercising certain possibilities that they see in art, and therefore in themselves..."

Willis on Painting

"To describe 21st Century spatial concepts (in painting) is to try and depict the basic interconnectedness of matter in which form only appears separate. In fact, all form struggles to maintain itself in the dynamic flow of space and time. The essence of nature and of our own human existence is change, movement towards or way from one form to the next... "