1941-2012
Robert Thornley, a sculptor of abstract stone pieces, led a childhood during which he never knew his father and watched his mother drink herself to the point of hopelessness, and, ultimately, suicide. Thornley had embarked on an early marriage and life of an enlisted man in the Air Force, then a uranium miner in Utah and Montana. From the age of 15, his own drinking was nonstop. His mining career ended when a co-worker with whom he had traded shifts was crushed by a huge slab of rock and died in Thornley’s arms on the way to the hospital. His drinking ended later, originally at the order of his then-wife, but ultimately because he was able to see what it was doing to him. Robert Thornley, a full-time artist also takes on the demands of caring full-time for a chronically ill spouse, who has battled spinal and brain cancer since 1997. To challenge Thornley even more he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1999.