William K. Thornton
This is my dad, William Keith Thornton (1938 – 2023). An amateur artist, husband, dad, electrical engineer and much more.
He was “Bill” to those who knew him. Talented in so many things, methodical in this thinking, and creative in how he solved problems and created art. In the evenings after work and on weekends, he could be found in our backyard shop building in Little Rock making a painting, sketch or carving wood. It was only after he passed away that we realized he had completed 5,000 pieces of art.
Born in 1938 in McCrory, Arkansas, he was the son of a tenant farmer and started working in the fields as a young boy. These were character defining moments that influenced him to his core, which he carried throughout his life and taught to his children.
His first job on the farm was taking water to his family in the fields, which inspired a mixed-media construction titled, “I Was a Waterboy in 1944” that won an honorable mention in the abstract category at the Grand Prairie Festival of Arts in 1995.
In his teenage years, he began a hobby of taxidermy. He was probably painting then, too, but nothing survives from that time in his life. By his early twenties, he was definitely drawing, as we have some pencil work from 1960 while he was in the U.S. Air Force.
His art hobby spanned at least 55 years and included watercolor, oil, pastel, pencil and wood carving.
Most of his paintings from the 1980s and onward were created from photographs he took of the subject. He and my mom would drive all over Arkansas and surrounding states, taking 35mm pictures of barns, silos, cotton gins, fields, old storefronts and more. They would print the photos, find what he liked, and he would paint it. Arkansas barns were his favorite. Sometimes he would pull out a photo he took years before and paint it.
Unfortunately, we don’t have any photographs of him painting in his shop. His final painting was completed in 2015, a couple of years after symptoms of dementia began to appear.
