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stills:

Colorfield paint­ings have always been a favorite. This is a won­der­ful con­ver­sa­tion with Thorton Willis. His paint­ings as fresh today as when he began.

from the artist:

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.

- Thornton Willis, (excerpted from exhi­bi­tion cat­a­logue), 2002

video: Directed by Michael Feldman. Featuring Thornton Willis and James Panero.Produced in coör­di­na­tion with Willis’s March 2009 exhi­bi­tion at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York.

A pro­file of the abstract painter Thornton Willis from James Panero on Vimeo.

web­site : Thornton Willis