Thornton Willis, Elizabeth Harris Gallery

Willis has been an abstract painter for a long time.  Where other artists go stale after working the same territory for some time he has managed to keep his art fresh over the years while staying true to his defined sense of style.  Perhaps the last word on this body of work is that while Thornton Willis is dead serious about abstract painting he has also never forgotten to temper that with the pure joy and celebration that is also required.

Like Thornton Willis, Cecily Kahn is another artist with a strong sense of style but who does not let it get in the way of her artistic curiosity.  Her work has always been composed of a mixture of organic and geometric forms combined with an excellent color sense and a variety of paint handling.  Given those parameters she then lets the work go where it will as she explores a wide variety of arrangements for those elements.  A couple of new parameters are her more explicit inclusion of forms suggesting a skein or ‘grill’ of paint and a more robust attention given to ‘painted’ textures to define the forms.  Given their new emphasis I was initially unsure of how well these integrated into the work.  In some, for example, the incorporation of the more explicit skeins doesn’t seem to meld as well in some pieces which results in a bit too much separation between all the forms. As has been the case in

Cecily Kahn, Lohin Geduld Gallery