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The nerve of failure I think is paramount. Learning by mistakes, modifying, reconstituting, reorganizing.
National Medal of Arts
Wayne Thiebaud was born in Mesa, Arizona, but his parents moved to Long Beach, California when he was only six months old. He would spend most of his youth in Southern California, but his large Mormon family had deep roots in the desert Southwest, and the young Wayne Thiebaud also spent a number of years living on an uncle’s ranch in Utah. His early enthusiasm for comic strips and illustration led to an interest in serious art. Although he showed a precocious talent for drawing, fine art training — or even a college education — seemed like remote possibilities in the depressed economy of the 1930s. One summer between terms in high school, a teenage Thiebaud found work at Walt Disney Studios as an “in-betweener,” laboriously drawing the thousands of individual frames that gave the illusion of movement to animated characters. The following summer, he enrolled in the Frank Wiggins Trade School in Los Angeles with the intention of learning sign painting. Experienced commercial artists in the school encouraged him to study illustration, and he set himself to learning the skills of a commercial artist.
His budding career as a cartoonist and graphic designer was interrupted by World War II. From 1942 to 1945, Thiebaud served in the U.S. Army Air Force, where his skills as an artist kept him out of combat. During the war, he met and married Patricia Patterson. Their first child, Twinka, was born in 1945. A second daughter, Mallary Ann, was born in 1951. After the war, Wayne Thiebaud resumed his career as a commercial artist, working for the Rexall drugstore chain, among others. At Rexall he met a fellow commercial artist, Robert Mallary, who was also an aspiring fine artist. Mallary encouraged Thiebaud to study fine art, and to broaden his education generally. Nearing 30 years of age, Thiebaud enrolled in the California State University system, first at San Jose and then at Sacramento, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Thiebaud had set himself a new goal, to support his family by teaching while pursuing a career as a fine artist. He found work at Sacramento City College, where he worked throughout the 1950s.
Thiebaud spent a sabbatical year in New York City, where he made the acquaintance of the leading American painters of the day. Among these were the abstract expressionists Willem De Kooning and Franz Kline, as well as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, two painters whose work would later be identified as cornerstones of the pop art movement.
At this time, Thiebaud found a way to apply the formidable technical skills he had acquired during his years as a commercial artist to a new and unique subject matter. He began to paint small canvasses depicting brightly colored food products — pies, cakes, candy and ice cream cones — displayed as in shop windows, meticulously rendered with multi-hued outlines and the hyper-realistic shadows characteristic of commercial art. While conventional still lifes are painted with the artist observing real objects as he paints, Thiebaud drew his pictures of food entirely from memory and imagination, a practice that contributed to the dreamlike intensity of his vision.
There were no galleries to speak of in Sacramento in the 1950s, so Thiebaud exhibited wherever he could, in shops and restaurants, even in the concession booth of a drive-in theater. Impressed with the artists’ cooperatives he had observed in New York, he founded a cooperative gallery in Sacramento, now known as Artists Contemporary Gallery, and an artists’ retreat known as the Pond Farm. In 1958, Thiebaud and his wife Patricia divorced. Their daughter Twinka became a celebrated artist’s model, author and painter in her own right. Wayne Thiebaud later married filmmaker Betty Jean Carr, and adopted her son Matthew, who also became an artist. The couple had a second son, Paul, who became a noted art dealer and gallerist.
Thiebaud’s work was making an impression on his colleagues but had not yet found a general audience. This began to change in 1961, when he met the New York art dealer Allan Stone. Stone was initially indifferent to the slides he saw of Thiebaud’s food paintings, but when the artist contacted him again a year later, Stone remembered them vividly and agreed to represent him. Stone became his exclusive dealer and a close personal friend. His first showings at Allan Stone Gallery resulted in major sales. In addition to showings at Stone’s gallery, Thiebaud’s work was featured in two historic group shows in 1962. The Pasadena Art Museum’s “New Painting of Common Objects” is regarded as the first exhibition of pop art in America. Thiebaud’s paintings were included alongside the work of Roy Lichtenstein, Jim Dine and Andy Warhol — an artist with whom Thiebaud felt little affinity — but the exhibition attracted national attention and made Wayne Thiebaud a major name in the art world. Later that same year, the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York presented an “International Exhibition of the New Realists,” which again grouped Thiebaud with Warhol and Lichtenstein, as well asJames Rosenquist. Coming on the heels of the Pasadena exhibit, the show at Sidney Janis made pop art the dominant visual style of the ’60s.
Thiebaud never embraced the concept of pop art, often characterized as a parody or critique of commercialism and consumer society. Thiebaud preferred to describe himself as a traditional painter of illusionistic form, and regarded the craftsmanship of advertising, cartoons and commercial illustration with respect and affection. He also distinguished himself among his contemporaries through his exacting craftsmanship and his uncompromising dedication to his own vision, without regard for changing fashions or trends in the art world.
As other artists adopted the now accepted pop art motifs, Thiebaud turned increasingly to the representation of the human figure, rendered in meticulous detail, but with a dispassionate sense of weight and solidity that freed the painted figure from any implication of sentimentality or superficial appeal. In the mid-’60s, Thiebaud also took up printmaking, a practice he has pursued alongside his painting ever since. In the 1970s he carried on with his examination of everyday objects, including shoes and cosmetics, while painting his first major landscapes, dizzying street scenes inspired by the vertiginous topography of San Francisco. He continued his landscape series for the next 20 years, finding haunting beauty in apparently commonplace scenes, rendered with hyper-realistic detail.
He has received numerous honors for his work, most notably the National Medal of Arts, presented to him by PresidentWilliam J. Clinton in a 1994 ceremony at the White House. A 2001 retrospective of his work at the Whitney Museum in New York won enthusiastic acclaim. After the death of Allan Stone in 2006, Thiebaud was represented by his son, art dealer Paul Thiebaud, until Paul’s death in 2009. Although Wayne Thiebaud retired from full-time teaching at age 70, his decades of mentoring younger artists has had a major influence on American art. Many of his students have enjoyed distinguished artistic careers, not the least of whom was the lateFritz Scholder (1937-2005). At age 100, Wayne Thiebaud was still painting; his centennial was observed with major exhibitions in Sacramento and San Francisco. His vast body of work continues to inspire and delight viewers with its unique vision of the charm and beauty of everyday things.
(See a video montage of the paintings of the American master artist Wayne Thiebaud.)
- Career
- Date of Birth
- November 15, 1920
- Date of Death
- December 26, 2021
In 1960, painter Wayne Thiebaud’s brilliantly colored images of pies, candy and hot dogs seemed worlds apart from the severe abstractions then fashionable in the serious art world. But when a New York gallerist took a chance on the struggling Californian, his paintings sold like proverbial hot cakes. Today, his canvases hang in the world’s great museums, and routinely fetch millions of dollars at auction.
For half a century since, Thiebaud has continued to paint, print and draw, finding an otherworldly beauty in the everyday objects of this world: food, clothing, shoes, tools, city streets. The representational skills he learned as an illustrator and cartoonist in the 1930s and ’40s, combined with a keen critical sense and a thorough command of the history and traditions of painting, have given his work solidity and staying power that transcend the changing tastes of the times.
Wayne Thiebaud has shared his gifts with the world, not only as a working artist, but over a lifetime of teaching, developing the skills and critical faculties of succeeding generations of artists. His paintings, seen firsthand, convey a visceral delight to the beholder, while his works in reproduction have indelibly colored our view of the American landscape.
National Medal of Arts
Let’s talk about your first New York show. It was at the Allan Stone Gallery, wasn’t it?
Wayne Thiebaud: The first New York show, yes. That was in 1962.
And was that where you sold your first paintings or was it prior to that?
Wayne Thiebaud: No, I had sold paintings. I’d sold lots of paintings locally to wonderful people who were supportive, in Sacramento and other places. But these newer paintings, they were troubling to people, and understandably so.
Which ones are we talking about?
Wayne Thiebaud: Pies and cakes and the hot dogs, those things. So Allan also — Allan Stone, the dealer — was very puzzled by them, and it took him a year or two to get to a point of saying, “Before I got the courage to show the damn thing,” was the way he put it. And that’s quite a mark of his ability and loyalty, to take me on and see what he could do. We didn’t have very many hopes. He said to me, “I think you’re a good painter. I don’t know about these, but we’ll show them and we’ll show them. I’ll try to get a plan of about five to ten years where we keep showing things of yours in the hope you gain a kind of clientele.” And that’s what we did. So it was a big shock to find that, serendipitously, pop art came in, and we were sort of shunted into that sudden interesting world, that is, interesting to critics and interesting to people. And that’s how really it occurred.
Let’s talk about the subject matter that you originally became famous for. Those desserts and shoes, gumballs. What inspired you to adopt that subject matter?
Wayne Thiebaud: I can’t take any credit for any theoretical or philosophical awareness of it.
It was somehow important to me to be honest in what we do, and to love what it is we paint. These were lessons given to me by other artists, obviously. To do what you love, or are interested in, or have some regard for. And it seems to me that it’s easy to overlook what we spend our majority of time doing, and that’s an intimate association with everyday things: putting on our shoes, tying our ties, eating our breakfast, cooking our meals, washing our dishes. Somehow that ongoing human activity seems to me very much worth doing. It’s only when we become presumptive, I think — to think we’re better than that, and we’d like to be, and should think of ourselves being better — that we begin to ignore those things. But in a wonderful way, children really remind us of it. They go to the gumball machines with their little penny and put it in and say, “Look, Dad!” Look what came out of this terrible-looking thing, this magenta sweet little whirl of wonder. And that, to me, is as good as we get.
There seems to be almost a humility about that.
Wayne Thiebaud: I don’t know if it’s humility. I think it’s just good stuff.
Gazing at your paintings of cakes and pies, the first thing that strikes one is how delicious they look. There’s a welcoming, pleasurable aspect to these paintings.
Wayne Thiebaud: Well you know, bakeries and display people are very good at making them look almost transcendent, just like they do with diamonds. I mean how many lights they put on them to make them sparkle so much, or used car places where they have a row of lights to light them up and make them sparkle.
You do that too in your own way.
Wayne Thiebaud: Yes, I hope so. What’s the use of making something and making it look bad?
In many of these paintings there’s repetition. Not just one piece of pie, but a showcase of pies.
Wayne Thiebaud: Well, it has to do with the tradition of painting, of orchestrating a single shape into its various configurative potentials. If you look closely, they look all alike at first, until you examine them. Each one is curiously different in some minor way. That orchestrating principle you can find all through the tradition and history of painting, because it’s an obvious design concept. It’s like a drum beat, you know, slight variation, repetition, rhythms and so on.
Is there also a connection to commercial art?
Wayne Thiebaud: Very much so, yes. After all, they’re trained in the same skill as the fine arts. They’re very, very good at what they do, and they’re very artful in what they do.
We still, I think, haven’t got the categories fully straightened out about fine art and commercial art. We like to think we have, but I don’t know. It’s proven to be, actually now, that American illustrators of a certain quality are commanding very high prices all of a sudden, because they’re so damn special. And if art — if the character of art — doesn’t contain the idea of specialness, rare achievement, and of a certain limited convention, then I think we’ve got it wrong if we don’t celebrate anything which makes and comes to these rare achievements.
You grew up in Southern California, but you also spent some time on a ranch in Utah. Your uncle was a maker of roads and so forth. Do you think these were formative influences on your art, where you grew up and the things you observed?
Wayne Thiebaud: I’m sure that’s true in some way. I was lucky to have a lot of good uncles. My grandmother gave birth to 11 children and they all married, so a great range of people, great aunts, great uncles, all this kind of interacting family, quite active.
A close family too?
Wayne Thiebaud: Yes, they always were sort of close together, a lot of them. Essentially, it’s a Mormon-based family. So that sort of clannish one is much like any religious company that was sort of terrorized by prejudice and so on. So it made it even a closer-knit family, I think.
Were there artists in the family?
Wayne Thiebaud: No, not that I know of. Mostly farmers, businessmen, traveling salesmen, fishermen, a huge, very nice range of differences.
What about your parents? What kind of work did they do?
Wayne Thiebaud: My father was a mechanic-inventor, and mother, a homemaker. I was a spoiled child. And they couldn’t have been a greater psychological base to give me the kind of ego I have.
In what sense?
Wayne Thiebaud: Just that I felt I could do anything I wanted. And that made me a very poor student, because they didn’t check on grades. Even though my grandfather came from a kind of quasi-intellectual tradition, he was a school teacher and then the superintendent of schools, and later became a kind of practicing inventive farmer. So it was a long range of influences and interests.
Where was your uncle’s ranch? Was that in Utah?
Wayne Thiebaud: Right, in South Utah, between St. George and Cedar City, sort of red earth country, very beautiful. Probably had a lot of influence on interest in landscapes, very beautiful country in so many different ways.
You kind of ricocheted back from Southern California to Utah and then back again, I gather.
Wayne Thiebaud: Yes. Mostly Southern California, about three or four years spent on a ranch in Southern Utah.
You liked sports as a kid too, didn’t you?
Wayne Thiebaud: Always.
Did you play organized sports?
Wayne Thiebaud: I did in high school, and junior leagues, and it’s always been pretty central to what I do.
What sports did you play back then?
Wayne Thiebaud: Basketball early on. I came to tennis very late, but I played almost all sports: baseball, softball, track and field.
How late did you come to tennis?
Wayne Thiebaud: I must have been 40 years old before I ever played tennis. That’s why I have such a rotten game.
You’re still playing, of course.
Wayne Thiebaud: Still playing, but it’s what you call a public courts game, just with no lessons in the beginning, which can ruin your game.
It’s interesting that you’re still committed to exercise and sports. Do you think there’s a relationship between the body and art?
Wayne Thiebaud: Very much so, central. It’s what Gloria Steinem identifies as the most revolutionary human emotion, that is, empathy. And since the body is the measure of empathy, it’s crucially central to the kind of critical concern about the inner workings of a painting: its thrust, its spatial illusionism, the coherence with which we judge balance, symmetry, tension, grace. Those are all based on a body, its feel, extremities, those kinds of things.
Scale, as well?
Wayne Thiebaud: Scale, absolutely, yeah.
If you’re not participating with your body when you’re looking at a painting, whether it’s a Cezanne — which has to do with a kind of equivocation, ambiguity, a sense of alternation — or in the case of someone like Velazquez, where the physical attributes of his painting, the knowledge that he’s showing you, and the feeling which he’s expressing, that’s all about the body, whether it’s sitting well, a state of tension, whether that heel really feels like it’s gripping the ground or expressing that contact. All of those we measure really by — in my judgment — the body and its issues.
So you want to feel as connected to your body as possible, as an artist?
Wayne Thiebaud: Yes. That’s why I have difficulty in convincing students to stand when they paint, rather than sit, for instance. There’s a real difference in the character of gesticulation and location, things like that.
Going back to your childhood and school years, were there particular books you read that were important to you?
Wayne Thiebaud: Lots of books, but I wasn’t a great student or a great reader until quite late. I was bored at school, so that wasn’t something I could get any interest in, to the disgust I think of my teachers who were always sending notes home. “Wayne is not dumb, but he won’t do anything.” So that was a real misfortune actually, and to my disgrace, I came to learning very late, in the sense of literature or all the things I later began to treasure.
But not too late.
Wayne Thiebaud: Hopefully.
When did you first begin to see yourself as an artist?
Wayne Thiebaud: Never. I don’t like the term “artist.” It’s a term which I’m uncomfortable with, but I love the idea of being a cartoonist, a draftsman, a designer, a painter — those other things which we make clear objective information about. So the idea of being a fine artist came very, very late, and came by way of examples of people who I became aware of, their extraordinary achievements.
Like who?
Wayne Thiebaud: It began really with cartoonists. A great example would have been George Herriman, the creator ofKrazy Kat. Extraordinary man and extraordinary artist. When you use the term “artist,” then you’re talking about the highest achievement within each of those categories. But then, slowly, all of the painters. I read a book which meant a lot to me, Van Loon’sArtists’ Lives, talking about Rembrandt and those kinds of people. I never imagined myself ever even getting to a point where I might be able to pursue those things. But I still had this awe of artists. And again, you go to museums a lot, read more, particularly biographies and artist biographies. So as I said, I came to it quite late.
You studied at a trade school.
Wayne Thiebaud: Yes, it was called Frank Wiggins Trade School in Los Angeles.
How old were you when you studied?
Wayne Thiebaud: I was still in high school actually. But I found out about it and went up actually to study sign painting. They taught cooking and sign painting, carpentry, plumbing, mechanics. But it was a great trade school, and they taught these kids these opportunities, and among them were a couple of really lovely former commercial artists, one a women’s dress designer, a fashion illustrator, and another old guy that had been kicking around art service groups, commercial art groups. Both of them very patiently would take us kids and show us how to do things. And it was a marvelous, marvelous chance. I think I was 16 at the time.
What do you think the trade school experience did for you ultimately as a painter and craftsman?
Wayne Thiebaud: Well, it just showed you very practical ways to do things, how to put a hat on a head, how to find the sole of a shoe and build the shoe up from that, or to think about advertising posters and all of its consequences, very exciting stuff. I just wanted to be a red-hot advertising art director from then on.
You worked for Rexall drugstores for a while, didn’t you?
Wayne Thiebaud: Worked for quite a number of advertising agencies. Rexall was the main one, until I went to New York. And that was a great opportunity. And that’s of course where I met a very important person to me, Robert Mallary. He was pursuing fine art, even though he was working as a commercial artist. And he’s the first one who showed me how dumb I was, and how I better get myself together if I was going to take seriously the idea of doing anything. But, as I expressed an interest in fine art at that time — because I had been going to museums — he really gave me my first serious critical confrontation with how hard you had to work, how you had not to expect much, because you were dealing with a tradition which was an extraordinary community of excellence. So you prepared yourself, and you should say to yourself, “I’m lucky to be in this community of excellence,” and you may not do very much, but it should be serious, well-intentioned and highly critical. And he was one of the most extraordinary, foremost critics — to this day — I’ve ever met.
You’ve said in previous interviews that he helped expose you to the life of the mind.
Wayne Thiebaud: Right, exactly.
Your daughter is named for him, is that right?
Wayne Thiebaud: Yes, Mallary Ann.
That’s lovely. It sounds like you did eventually take school more seriously, when you went back to college.
Wayne Thiebaud: Exactly. Yes, I did. I was lucky, because in some ways the state college systems at that time were just sort of forming, and they gave me credit by special examination for the portfolio I had developed. So I sort of got through the art part sort of uneducated, but the other part, the literate part, and the kind of fundamental college courses were very important to me, and that’s what I sort of concentrated on to get a degree, with the idea that I could then maybe become a teacher. I gave up the idea of becoming a commercial artist and began to become a teacher and a painter.
Is creativity something that one can teach?
Wayne Thiebaud: I have no idea. I think maybe there can be issues where examples can be shown of… maybe how to work, how to think, how to criticize, and the challenge of not doing something which is known, but something which is unknown. I think creativity is a very mysterious idea. But if you are interested in creativity, then I think the fundamentals of learning and criticizing are essential.
Some people think it’s the ability to quiet the critic within us that enables us to be creative or to let go, but you’re saying that the critic also has to be engaged in a way. Isn’t that a difficult paradox?
Wayne Thiebaud: I don’t think so, because if you’re engaged, as you say, you’re working, theoretically, so hard that you’re willing to make mistakes, and you know that doing something once is never enough. As Degas says, “If you start drawing, be sure you draw it ten times.” Correct it over and over again — even a hundred times — to get to that ballet slipper fitting on the shoe properly. In that instance, I think you don’t think of creativity so much, because what you’re doing is creating all the time. Some of it not very good, but it’s a creation nonetheless, and the nerve of failure I think is paramount. Learning by mistakes. Modifying, reconstituting, reorganizing, over and over again.
You’ve been known to go back to paintings that you’ve finished and rework them.
Wayne Thiebaud: Almost always. A miracle occurs often, when something happens and you almost feel you had nothing to do with it. It’s just suddenly there.
As if from outside you?
Wayne Thiebaud: I’m one sort of against mysteriousness about painting. But it’s there somewhere. But when you think about it, painting itself is a kind of miracle, because what you’re doing is reducing a three-dimensional world of living, active organized chaos into this little, flat, unmoving, quiet, flat thing, which has to, in some ways, be able to speak to you.
So in a way you can never perfectly reach that?
Wayne Thiebaud: I don’t think so. I don’t think perfection is a very interesting thing, because we are all imperfect. And that’s quite wonderful, because it’s what we call human.
Your own paintings are now worth millions. How does that feel?
Wayne Thiebaud: Puzzling and curiously unreal. Something which you never ever would think of it ever occurring. Dangerous, in a sense of over-celebration. Unreal, in terms of value structure. Obviously it’s going to change, if we look carefully. If we’re interested at all, that kind of interest goes up and down, like the stock market, sometimes to disastrous results, in many instances. So I think it’s a fascinating phenomenon. Interesting, but very puzzling and very temporary, I think.
You’ve said that no painter is ever satisfied completely with a work of art, and that it’s the next painting that attracts his or her attention.
Wayne Thiebaud: I think so, yes. I think any painters that I admire and am interested in — which occupy positions of achievements in a consensus way — most of them are kind of always hanging on by their fingertips, hoping that the next painting will be better, where they can finally get that vision that they have in their mind.
Is that part of creativity in a way, the striving to get there the next time?
Wayne Thiebaud: I think it’s the quest and the challenge that keeps you going. When you get to a point of where you can do something, somehow, that you feel you can do, and you anticipate the end result, it’s no longer very interesting. You’ve got to, I think, risk making a terrible painting, or a terrible idea, and see what you can do with it. And it’s often disastrous. I mean, if you can get one painting out of 12 or 15, that’s a very high batting average, and you better look to yourself to be a little bit more… editing. And you see, one of the problems with painters is we don’t have editors like you do. We know and you know how important editors are, and have been. So we then have to, I think, really move to critical confrontation, in order to somehow, hopefully ensure that you’re not degrading your work, being repetitive, becoming a kind of art world employee where you’re expected to make these light manufacturing products. I think that’s a kind of death.
What was your own feeling about the works of some of your contemporaries? Andy Warhol, for instance, which looked quite a bit like commercial art?
Wayne Thiebaud: I had no interest at all, because I thought the commercial artists were much better than he was, and still feel that way. I think the lessons and the influence and the quality of pop art has to be seriously addressed in reality. For those people who gave them their appropriation — styles which they took, as they admit — those people deserve also a great deal of credit as great designers, great cartoonists, great photographers. I think that needs to be addressed in terms of the effect and quality achievement and philosophic equipment of pop art. I’m a kind of heretic, I guess, but I’m not very interested in pop art.
But you were touched by some other contemporaneous painters, Richard Diebenkorn, for instance.
Wayne Thiebaud: Yes, very much, very much.
Could you tell us how they affected you?
Wayne Thiebaud: Well, there are great lessons and great influences and I’ve actually stolen things from them. I do try to do what they do. De Kooning in terms of hispremier coup bravura painting. That’s a long, long tradition starting with Velasquez, through Manet to Soutine. De Kooning, Manet, where they have to juggle simultaneously several perceptual images at once and make a coalescent form, which encases and combines those perceptual nuances all at once. That’s why they make so many failures of course.
Hard to do.
Wayne Thiebaud: Yeah. Oh, practically impossible.
Your cityscapes, scenes of San Francisco, seem to combine different perspectives in one image.
Wayne Thiebaud: Yes. Those were other influences, influences of Oriental painting, a Chinese tradition where you’re trying to integrate several projective systems into one.
What is a projective system?
Wayne Thiebaud: A single point perspective, where you look at a railroad track, that’s one system. Two-point perspective is when you have two-point perspective. Cezanne’s paintings have eight or nine perspectives, various views of the same still life viewed from several angles and trying to incorporate that into one. Chinese perspective — which is the opposite of one-point perspective — where instead of the railroad tracks vanishing, they’re coming into you. And to orchestrate those into one entity is a wonderful challenge and a great treat to fool around with, mostly unsuccessfully, but wonderfully exciting.
I read that you had a breakthrough when, instead of painting directly from an intersection in San Francisco, you made a series of drawings or watercolors, sort of put a bunch of different aspects together.
Wayne Thiebaud: Back into the studio and began just to use these various paintings from various points of view and trying to — I was trying to get the feeling of equilibrium and disequilibrium, because you feel that in, I think, San Francisco. It’s hard to imagine how those cars can stay on the street, or buildings can suddenly thrust themselves up on a kind of… what seems to be an earth mound. It just makes you feel, “This can’t work.” So that was very much a part, at least, of the ideas I wanted to try to get into it. I think it has to do, again, with what we talked about with body empathy. It helps to enliven. What you have to do with a painting is to enliven it with your body, to feel its tensions, to feel its dislocation or to feel its comfort. “Gee, this feels really stable,” for instance. On the other hand, if it’s a little too stable it can die on you. So it’s a wonderful tightrope walk.
There is some humor in these paintings too, isn’t there?
Wayne Thiebaud: I hope so, yeah, after all I’m an old cartoonist and love cartoons. Critics don’t realize when they talk about them as sort of cartoony that that’s a great compliment to me. I collect all those old guys and have a great admiration and love for them.
Has it made any difference in your work, working in a relatively small city like Sacramento, as opposed to living in Manhattan or L.A. or Paris?
Wayne Thiebaud: I’d love to live in Manhattan or Paris, or any place!
Do you think it’s had an impact on your work to be in a relatively calm environment, outside of the jetsetting cities?
Wayne Thiebaud: Yeah. I really don’t have any idea, because I think of myself walking down Madison Avenue, or looking for the next gallery, or the museum.
You could be there if you wanted to.
Wayne Thiebaud: I was, two different times, about a year each time. But I think I did miss space, maybe.
Light also?
Wayne Thiebaud: No, I’ll tell you something about light. What fascinates me is what you can do about the light — creating light — in painting. I get my impetus from that. Not from light, oddly enough, but from the tradition of painting. Particularly in Bonnard, Matisse, German expressionists, Indian miniature painting, Chinese painting where the light is created by the interaction of colors, value, hue and intensity.
You’ve also mentioned Richard Diebenkorn as an influence.
Wayne Thiebaud: Very much, because he’s interested in that same kind of process. Bonnard, Matisse, Indian miniature paintings, which he collected. That’s where the light comes from, a spectral relationship within the painting itself.
What does the American Dream mean to you? You’ve talked in other interviews about that sort of American state of mind, kind of a “do-it-yourself” spirit.
Wayne Thiebaud: Well, I’m essentially a kind of self-educated person, I guess. But I think everybody is; that’s the way we really learn. In other words, you see examples and so on. But I didn’t ever go really to a formal art school, for instance, particularly a fine arts school. But I would love to have gone, I wanted to go. So in that case, it’s possible, I think, not only in America but every place, to take it on yourself. But that is a part, I think, of the American character, in terms of the frontier theory idea, where you make your own hot rod or you build your own log cabin. You know, all these instances of hands-on, willing to work, “I can make it better. I can do it differently.” So that is a part, at least for me, of what I do. I think the work for me is very American, although I love all art, from whatever country or tradition. I just think that where you live, how you live, and what you take on, mostly is this little area of America for me.
Thank you so much for speaking with us today.
Wayne Thiebaud: Now I’m going to run.
Okay. Thank you so much.
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