F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, "There are no second acts in American lives." However in the past few years, a painter by the name of Thornton Willis, born in 1936, has re-emerged from near-obscurity. Almost 40 years after his New York debut, and after a brief shot at fame in the 1970s as a post-Minimalist, Willis is now creating some of the boldest work of his life, with critically acclaimed back-to-back New York solo shows, at Elizabeth Harris Gallery in Chelsea and Sideshow Gallery in Williamsburg. In an era defined by market trends, Willis is that uncompromised artist who still manages to rise above public taste.

"I was always an abstract painter," he recently told me. "I’ve always done what feels right." Willis is one of my favorite artists to visit in the studio. I spoke with him in his unadorned SoHo loft, among canvases propped against the walls, in the same neighborhood where he has lived and painted since the late 1960s. Here Willis is an original artist-resident, someone who has painted his way through the neighborhood’s transformation from industrial wasteland to multi-million-dollar residential enclave.

"I hardly think when I paint; I’m feeling," says Willis. Seeing abstract art for the first time in the 1950s, he continues, "was like a punch in the face, a punch in the gut. A boom! Something fundamental to the human condition. I didn’t know what painting was before that. Seeing that work was the epiphany that brought me to painting. I’ve been chasing that ever since."

Willis’s chase began in Pensacola, Florida. His family roots go back to rural Virginia and Georgia. His father was a Church of Christ minister, an evangelical who established congregations throughout the South. When his mother fell ill, Willis went to live with his grandparents. He was 7. "I always liked to draw. When I was 4 years old, my dad used to sit me on his lap and read the Sunday comics to me. They were in color. I was fascinated with the boxes, the color."

Willis began in architecture school at Auburn University in Alabama. There he caught two traveling exhibitions: One featured the students of Hans Hofmann, the legendary painter and teacher of the Abstract Expressionists, and the other was a show of New York School painters brought by the American Federation of Arts. "Seeing those paintings spoke to me. It hit me on the head," Willis recalls. He decided to become a painter, transferring to the University of Southern Mississippi to pursue abstract painting under the G.I. Bill. He then enrolled in graduate school at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa to study with Melville Price, an abstract artist from the 10th Street years who died in 1970 at the age of 49. In a recent interview with myartspace.com, Willis said, "From Mel I learned that the idea was to ‘live the work.’ To ‘be in’ the painting and to see the work as an extension of one’s self."

The life of the artist does not always fit into one’s assumptions about art history. By the time Willis arrived at abstract painting, Pop Art and Minimalism were in their heyday. "I see myself as having rejected those two possibilities," he says. "Minimalism was reductive. I could not work that way. I need to act out on a painting. I need to work through accident."

Willis moved to New York in 1967, a time when painters were starting to challenge the confines of Minimal art and experiment again with improvisation. "It was when Brice Marden and Richard Serra and Bob Ryman and Sean Scully began," he recalls. "Alan Saret and Gordon Matta-Clark and Lynda Benglis were finding new ways of making art: Serra tossing lead into the corners; or Saret working with chicken wire. It was sometimes referred to as the ‘fold and pleat’ movement. My work was taking the same cues."