Thornton Willis, “Omaha Flash”, 1985, Lithograph on Rives BFK, 22 x 30 Inches, Edition of 30
Often grouped in the 1980s with abstract painters Sean Scully and Elizabeth Murray, Willis used a zigzag shape to explore figure ground relationships in a series of oil stick drawings on paper and paintings consisting of layers of rolled acrylic paint that created multi-colored strata within each stripe or resulted in a multicolored background topped by a solid colored zigzag.
Of the resulting pictorial tension, critic David Carrier observed in 1984, “Even from a distance, we glimpse Rothko’s soft edges; even close up, we known that Stella’s lines are straight edges. By contrast, when approached, Willis’ hard-edged zigzags dissolve into a sequence of painterly layers whose gestural structure has no direct relation to that larger form which it defines.”