My longtime friend, the painter Thornton Willis, died June 15, 2025 from complications due to COVID and pneumonia. As soon as I heard about his death from his wife, Vered Lieb, I wrote a brief memory of my friendship with Thornton and sent it to her. She immediately wrote back asking if she could get someone to read it at his memorial. She told me later that their son David read it.
This is that statement:
“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 so 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 ta USM, a senior, and he came back as a teacher. I wasn’t in any of his classes because he taught freshman classes. 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 Raushenberg, 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 Gabi and I got to visit with him and meet you 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.”
Now, after Thornton’s memorial, Vered sent me a July 10 New York Times writeup, “Thornton Willis, 89, Who Brought Emotion to Geometric Painting, Dies” by Will Heinrich which included:
“Though Mr. Willis was deeply affected by the action and grit of painters like Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, he also took in such ostensibly contrary influences as Piet Mondrian and later hard-edge painters, resolving them all in canvases that balanced rich, organic brushwork against precisely organized, rigorously abstract composition.”
Heinrich also noted that the painter Neil Jenney remarked at the memorial service, “With the passing of Thornton Willis, we say goodbye to the greatest Abstract Expressionist of them all.”
Thornton took me under his wing and treated me like an equal when I was a high school student with aspirations to become an artist and he was a college senior. We remained long-distant friends throughout the rest of his life. I treasure the painting he did in 1964 that I inherited when he left it behind in our studio when he first moved to New York.
The last time I saw Thornton was years later when he revisited Hattiesburg, Mississippi when he had a show at the USM art gallery I was managing. I reminded him of the painting, and he responded, “Is it signed?” I said I didn’t think so, and Thornton said, “Let’s go.” and we went to my apartment where he signed it.
Find out more about Thornton Willis: https://www.thorntonwillis.com
This is a beautifully written and highly personal testimonial. My family and I appreciate it very much. Thornton was a great painter and many schools of painting flowed out from the explorations he was doing all his life towards expanding the language of Abstraction. His was a humble man and a great husband and dad. There are newspapers across the country and in the South where he was from that have written about his death. But this touches us the most, because you were friends he dearly loved. Thank you for this post.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment, Vered.