The Hand Inside Geometry

The triangle doesn’t cry. The zig-zag doesn’t tremble. But in the hands of Thornton Willis, they did something nearly miraculous—they felt. Willis, who passed away on June 15 at the age of 89, spent his life challenging the sterile precision often associated with geometry. His canvases weren’t cold diagrams or cerebral experiments—they were vital, breathing things, alive with brushstrokes and the accumulated weight of intention.

There was always a pulse in his grids. A tension in his edges. An almost embarrassing intimacy to his slats and lattices. And while Willis aligned himself with the New York School, he never imitated it. He wandered its borders instead, making work that neither capitulated to minimalism nor clung to the explosive drama of first-wave Abstract Expressionism. His was a slower burn.

From Marine Corps to Mercer Street

Born in Pensacola, raised in Montgomery, tempered by the Marine Corps, and later shaped in the studios of Alabama under Melville Price, Willis’s biography doesn’t read like your average New York art star trajectory. He arrived in SoHo in the late ’60s not as a brash revolutionary, but as a builder. A patient constructor of forms, a teacher, a neighbor, a painter who believed in edges—not just the ones on canvas, but the ones we live against.

The edges of society. The edge of process. The place where wet paint meets dry, where roller meets raw canvas, where color hesitates and then, gloriously, spills.

Slats, Triangles, and Human Weather

Willis titled his paintings like blunt objects: Slats, Wedges, Zig-Zags, Cityscapes, Lattices. They read like architectural plans or chapters in a visual grammar book. But the work itself never followed blueprints.

In pieces like Wall (1969), stripes and grids emerge through a wet-on-wet method, roller-on-floor, a process as performative as it was painterly. Later came the “Triangle” series—thicker, heavier, deeply invested in figure-ground tension—and the crisp Floating Lattice works of recent years, in which geometry finally learned to levitate.

Edges, he believed, were “where things happen.” Where the sea meets the land. Where the animal scurries. Where color and shape collide and compromise. Willis never trusted perfection. He preferred his lines a little flawed, his planes slightly askew.

The paintings may not resemble human likenesses, but they nevertheless seem somehow to proffer human character in the abstract.

– Wrote critic Joseph Masheck.

That’s it. Willis’s abstract paintings weren’t about representation. They were representation, in a different language. Less face, more weather system.

A Painter of Integrity, Not Ideology

Willis refused to belong. He was part of the New York School’s third wave but never folded himself into a movement. His work borrowed from postminimalism, Color Field painting, Biomorphic Cubism (his term, delightfully), and lyrical abstraction. And still, it remained undeniably his.

This refusal to be pinned down was not careerist rebellion. It was spiritual. Willis viewed painting as its own autonomous object—not a picture, but a presence.

I think of them as ‘not-pictures, as objects… that engage and actually reach out and touch the viewer.

– He said.

That engagement was hard-won. His brushwork, always visible, made each canvas feel honest, like an open letter or a map of emotional terrain. And it’s no accident that his canvases often seem in conversation with Franz Kline’s swagger and Barnett Newman’s structure—Willis was fluent in both gesture and geometry.

He stayed put as SoHo transformed around him. From Spring Street to Mercer, from lofts to luxury boutiques, from community to commerce.

I miss the integrity of people working for a living.

– He said—nostalgia not for poverty, but for purpose.

Legacy in Layers

A Guggenheim fellow, a NEA grantee, a Pollock-Krasner awardee—Willis earned his laurels slowly, like layers of paint drying over decades. He was recently the subject of a six-decade survey at the David Richard Gallery. He spent years represented by Elizabeth Harris Gallery before its closure.

His paintings now reside in MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, the Carnegie, and countless other collections. Yet Willis’s greatest contribution may be the quiet revolution he waged on the nature of abstraction: proving that geometric forms, in the right hands, could carry as much soul as a face.

Not every edge is sharp. Not every structure is sterile. In Thornton Willis’s work, the abstract became intimate. Geometry, for once, let its guard down.