Wayne Thiebaud
Wayne Thiebaud (1920-) was born at Mesa in Arizona, America. He spent over ten years working in New York and Hollywood as a cartoonist and advertisement designer, a period interrupted by four years serving with the US Army Air Force from 1942 to 1946. He graduated from Sacramento State College in 1951 and began teaching in the Art Department of Sacramento City College where he remained for eight years, after which he joined the University of California, Davis as professor of art.He is best known for his paintings of production line objects found in diners and cafeterias such as pies and pastries. He was associated with the Pop Art painters in his interest with objects of mass culture but his technique differed in that he used very thick paint. He later went on to paint popular characters such as Mickey Mouse and recent paintings such as 'Sunset Streets' (1985) and 'Flatland River' (1997) are notable for their hyper realism, in some ways similar to Edward Hopper in his fascination with the mundane scenes from everyday American life.
Often associated with the so-called Pop Art movement of the 1960s, Thiebaud is perhaps best known for his wry yet carefully studied still lifes of commonplace objects, such as cakes, slices of pie, sandwiches, clothing and household goods. Thiebaud is also well known for his stylized, plunging San Francisco cityscapes, and his more recent landscapes inspired by the San Francisco Bay Area, the Sacramento Valley and the Sierra foothills. Approaching his subjects with his signature "Californian" style, featuring an intensity of light and color and rich paint handling, Thiebaud strikes a delicate balance between realism and abstraction that gives his works a strongly personal character.
Wayne Thiebaud Wayne Thiebaud was born in Arizona in 1920 and has spent most of his life in California. He was originally inspired as a tennager by cartoons and comic strips such as George Herriman's "Krazy Kat." He established himself as a cartoonist, drawing a regular comic strip during his World War II stint in the Army Air Force, and even working for a brief time as an animator for the Walt Disney Studios. He also spent time as a poster designer and commercial artist before eventually deciding to become a painter.
Thiebaud's formal art training was undertaken under the GI Bill at San Jose State College and the California State College in Sacramento. He received a teaching appointment at Sacramento Junior College in 1951, while still in graduate school, and since then has continued to teach, most recently at the University of California in Davis.
Artistic Development In the 1950s, Wayne Thiebaud had developed a regional reputation by working with numerous exhibitions and artistic projects in and around San Francisco and Sacramento, and by the early 1960s his famous deadpan paintings of food and consumer goods began to emerge in their mature form. These depictions of middle-American, "blue collar" subjects such as sandwiches, gumball machines, cafeteria-type foods, toys, and paint cans led to Thiebaud's association, in the mind of the public, with the Pop Art movement.
Unlike much Pop Art, Thiebaud's still lifes do not attempt to satirize modern American consumer society. He approaches his subjects with reverence and nostalgia. The items shownÃÂÃÂcakes, pies, neckties, sandwiches, toys, and other objectsÃÂÃÂwere all "fragments of experience" rendered from Thiebaud's memory, and served as emotional links to various periods in his life. Other aspects of the Pop Art movement, like the practice of adopting commercial art styles and techniques, never appealed to Thiebaud. "I had too much respect for commercial artists. I appreciated how skilled they really are."
Wayne Thiebaud is also known for his interpretations of the San Francisco cityscape. Paintings such as Hill Street depict a San Francisco of exaggerated, plunging hills where buildings cling precariously to steeply sloping cliffs. The vertiginous streets and hills of Thiebaud's cityscapes often share space with busy, congested, and labyrinthine freeways. Many of these works, much like his still lifes, were made by Thiebaud from memory, referring not to one single geographic spot but to the concept and feeling of San Francisco as a whole.
Thiebaud's body of work also includes studies of individual and grouped figures, painted with the same intense lighting and rich brushwork as the still lifes. Recent paintings focus on the waterways and agricultural fields that define the landscape around the artist's home in the Sacramento Valley, and are all marked by a particularly intense combination of color and pattern.