abstract oils
1960 — 1964
In the 1960s, influenced by well-known painters of the New York School art scene, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Franz Klein—fifteen to twenty years older than Willard, and denizens of the nearby Cedar Bar in Greenwich Village—Willard entered a productive period of painting Abstract Expressionist oils in his Bowery studio.
He began analysis with a Jungian psychologist, exploring the consciousness of the inner self as a source of art. This process of self-discovery led him to create emotionally-charged content expressed as pure gesture and luminous color. Only about a dozen of these images remain, preserved from a series of 35mm Kodachrome transparencies that were made at the time.
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