John Havens Thornton

From his first body of Paintings in the early 1960’s, John Thornton has considered and employed the formal aesthetic concerns of color, line, form, space, and surface. But, over the course of his career to the present day, he has sought equally to create abstract art in which the viewer can perceive something of the artists’s personality. It is this quality that has always attracted and held Thornton’s attention to certain artists’s work, and one he deems essential for his own. Initially this may sound like a difficult feat to pull off effectively, but consider the value of how much can be determined about someone when listening to how he or she talks. Syntax, word choice, use of pauses, vocal inflection, expression and body language – all of these attendant elements of speech – provide an attentive listener with information that can deepen the meaning and view point of the speaker’s words. Learning something of an artists’s personality from viewing art, especially from a mode of artistic expression that may be challenging, is a parallel experience.

– from John Thornton Paintings: A Retrospective Exhibition catalog essay 2004, David B. Boyce, Co-Curator, New Bedford Art Museum