A First Look: The Philip Morris Arts Grant Purchase, Australian National Gallery at the Australian National University, Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra (1986); A New Generation 1983 – 1988 The Philip Morris Arts Grant Purchases, Australian National Gallery, Canberra (1988); Recent Australian Painting, Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne (1991); Works on Paper, Rex Irwin Gallery, Sydney (1994); The Blake Prize for Religious Art and touring (1995/96); Mulch & Metaphors: The Garden in Contemporary Art, Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery, Victoria (1997); Changing Surfaces, Shepparton Art Gallery, Victoria (2003); and The Wynne Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales (2007).

Thornton’s first solo exhibition was held in Melbourne in 1980 and he has continued to exhibit nationally ever since. His work is represented in collections throughout Australia including the National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of Western Australia, QUT Art Museum, Brisbane, Artbank, University of New South Wales, Philip Morris Arts Grant Collection: Parliament House, Canberra, Macquarie Bank, and AXA Australia.

(In my recent work) I have begun a series of paintings using a group of objects as still life subjects that had interested me for some time. They are quite unrelated: a child’s model garage from the 40’s, an old white tool box, an espaliered apple tree in our back yard and a skull.

I was fascinated with the scenarios that arise in dreams and the way seemingly unrelated objects coexist together or sit alone in isolation in an ambiguous space. I arranged these subjects on the canvas in a similar way detaching them from any realistic background and giving them this dream like quality, adding layers of washes, drips, stains, grids, collage and writing extracts from the dreams onto the surface [in mirror image as my 5 year old daughter was doing at the time] making it difficult but not impossible to read, as a dream is.