| THOMAS
SILLS Thomas Sills (Thomas Albert Sills) (1914 -2000)
Thomas Sills in his mid-thirties married the mosaicist, Jeanne Reynal. Inspired by her collection of abstract art, he began working with materials that his wife used in her mosaics, but soon branched out to oil on wood as well as canvas.
Thomas Sills spent most of his creative life in New York City, deeply rooted in the artistic trends as well as cultural issues from the early 1950’s to 1970’s. Unlike his friends: Mark Rothko and Barnet Newman who were very articulate in verbalizing about their work; he felt it was not necessary to pin down his art with words as did his other friends: William de Kooning, Arshile Gorky and Franz Kline.
Even though he lacked formal training, his self-taught artistic skills released phantasmical abstract paintings. His compositions of bright oils were an attempt to capture luminous mosaics of his wife, Jeanne Reynal. His provocative handling of color and innovative use of media attracted the attention of the New York avant-garde.
His regular presence in the art world of the 1950’s through the early 1970’s as an African American painter situated him as an integral element of the main stream and African American art. Thomas Sills, himself however, perceived his art beyond the political; he remained loyal to his commitment of art as a form of expression of the dynamism that escapes any formal constrains.
In the 1960’s and 1970’s when he was at the peak of his career, his work was widely shown in museums, he had four solo shows at Betty Parsons Gallery, was regularly featured in art journals and is in museum collections. Today, there is a renaissance of the popularity of his works. He is being exhibited in many shows, the recent one being Encore, Five Abstract Expressionists at Sidney Mishkin Gallery of Baruch College, The City University of New York in 2006 and at Anita Shapolsky Gallery in 2008.
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