Thornton Willis and James Little: Raising the Bar
Vered Lieb
James Little. Portrait of a Star, 2002. 78" x 96" Oil and Wax on Canvas
The Sideshow gallery in Williamsburg is a true work of love supported by artist/founder Richard Timperio, who has been showing some consistently terrific work for some time. Artist like showing with Timperio, saying that he is as real as it gets, exerts no pressure on the artist, and has a great eye for talent. His openings are especially attended by a young artist crowd who gravitate to the gallery as a resource, and possibly an alternative to the Madison Avenue creations of Chelsea. Timperio, a pioneer on Bedford Avenue, recently opened up the back wall of his gallery to accommodate the large new canvasses by James Little and Thorton Willis.
Thornton Willis and James Little have lived and worked in New York City for several decades and in the past few years have developed a strong friendship based on shared affinities in their painting. Both men came to New York from different parts of the Deep South. Willis grew up in Pensacola, Florida crossing the nearby border to attend Middle School in Montgomery, Alabama. While James Little was born and raised in Memphis Tennessee seventeen years later.
Willis grew up in the heart of the non-integrated South, a young white male from a farming community that, despite clichéd notions of the South, did not accept prejudice as a way of life. He received an MFA from The University of Alabama’s Tuscaloosa campus, which was also the hometown of the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. For Northern liberals the fact that Willis joined the civil rights movement in the early 1960’s might seem a no-brainer, but the sheer fact of location and the times rendered this an act of extreme personal courage.
James Little grew up in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement in the town that claims to be the Birthplace of the Blues, houses Elvis Presley’s Graceland, and also, the hotel where Martin Luther King was assassinated. He grew up in a South just beginning to accept integration, with more opportunity than the generation before him, but in a place where the sheer weight of history and poverty still littered the countryside with broken dreams, both black and white.
Each of these remarkable painters would probably reject any premise that their work inherits from this past, or that the friendship and support they extend to each other today has any other roots than in the fact that they inhabit now a time and place in New York where the kind of painting they are interested in is under attack by a marketplace in constant search for novelty over content. The fact is they are Native Sons fighting for native ground where American abstraction, like American Jazz, is for them and other artists, still the most profound means of expression.
James Little received his BFA from the Memphis Academy of Art, and his MFA from Syracuse University. He has shown in Museums, University, and private galleries in New York City since 1977, participated in a large number of group exhibitions all over the US from California to Boston, and in several international exhibitions in The Netherlands. His impressive resume includes The Studio Museum in Harlem as well as mainstream venues like Jack Tilton Gallery and Gary Snyder Fine Art.
A look at Thornton Willis’ resume makes one gasp at the fact that this painter has work in major museums in the US and Europe and yet is not somehow a household name. What enemies did this guy make to remain such an underground hero and "Painter’s Painter?" Frank Stella, Brice Marden, and Richard Serra have seen his shows, not because they were in such important galleries (although they have been) but because serious artists usually know what their contemporaries are working on.
Willis was on the cover of art magazines in the late 70’s and early 80’s, and historians will later argue if, with a few friends, he managed to bring back painting when it had been declared officially dead. But then he did the unspeakable and turned his work away from the massive painted triangles whose splattered and torn edges had attracted the establishment. Unlike Robert Ryman, Willis was the bad boy who abandoned a successful look to follow the yellow brick road of process. Similarly, Little could have decided to paint with fecal matter and we would now most likely be talking about his major retrospective somewhere in this country or in Europe. But he stuck with a harder, more intellectual, no- gimmick road.
At first sight it is easy to see that Geometry plays a part in both artists’ work, as does Rothko’s legacy of Color Field Painting, but they each treat the subject differently. Little chooses to open an escape hatch for Minimalism by leaving indicators (painterly versions of Hansel and Gretal’s breadcrumbs as it were) of how he derived both form and field. Little is a hard edge romantic and we accept the space where his colored volumes meet as natural. Willis uses the brush as a psychological vehicle; at first sight the naked brush stroke appears vulnerable and too honestly drawn, if possible. How is it possible that with all these strokes no one stroke appears to the viewer to recede or advance? Both artists successfully maintain the integrity of the picture plane with a plurality of shape, line, and color.
A well-known art critic once said of Willis’s paintings that they were too obvious, and it is likely that if you see either James Little or Thornton Willis only in reproduction you could have the same feeling of ground revisited. Yet looked at closely, it is clear that the work is not your grandmother’s Cubism, or your dad’s Abstract Expressionism, although both Cézanne and de Kooning would have known exactly what these guys are trying to pull off.
These paintings are not as simple as they look. Both artists participate in a kind of biomorphic cubism, a space in which Cubism meets Quantum Mechanics; old space meets new space. Without a chance to view the scale and physicality of these works you would be unable to experience those real (despite post modernism) feats of skill which include- yes Alice-composition, texture, color and a major ability to wield the brush like a Samurai wields his sword.
