"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;expansion and contraction; open and closed; tension and release. His paintings explore beginnings, first steps, and the building blocks of picture-making--the progression of point to line to plane; and of movement arrested in the plane...and whole planes of scratchy color churn with a flurry of brushwork, reminding us that flat color--vibrating, pulsing--needn't sit there inactively."

"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 n the abstract."

"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�s arrays of triangular shapes, which are packed into networks or unfurled in fan-like configurations, have a knock-about resplendence of color, whether he is working with stained-glass-deep reds and blues or with dusty greens and yellows of fallen leaves in late autumn. In these new paintings Willis easily tops the formal bravura of his work of two decades ago, when one of his large paintings with a singular triangular form was included in an International Survey at the Museum of Modern Art. Although Willis was always a powerful painter, he seems to me to be a far more inviting artist now, when he is multiplying his triangular forms, playing with different ranges of color, using informal brushwork that has a calligraphic abruptness. There is a fascinating mixture of delicacy and boldness to this work."

"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.

In my paintings the forms are locked in this flux. It is part of the dynamic of the work and meant to be so. In this work, figure and ground, positive and negative are all equal. There is a suggestion of volume in the form, which continues to interest me as I work towards depicting a kind of Biomorphic Cubism.

The way I work is to develop, intuitively, an image through a working process over a period of time. As the image develops, I begin making changes within that framework. The manner in which the painting happens; how it is conceived and then developed is of particular interest to me. Either the painting is an image or it contains an image. In either case, concerning the integrity of painting, it seems preferable that the image develops out of a working painterly process, no matter how complex or simple, as opposed to the appropriation or selection of imagery based on whim or theory."