Thornton Willis Improvised Structures at ELIZABETH HARRIS GALLERY

James Kalm caught up with Thornton Willis just minutes before the closing of his recent show. Willis has long been a practitioner of a type of reductive/geometric color field painting, and he’s now being regarded as an influential source of current abstraction. Your correspondent and Thornton chat about this suite of intimately scaled paintings, the differences between painting in oil and acrylic, the number of times the pundits have chanted “painting is dead”, and how young artists today are responding to reductive color based abstraction. This program was recorded December 22, 2018.