This oil is one of a series of riverscapes painted in the 1990's by California
artist Wayne Thiebaud (see Photograph 1).
Born in Mesa, Arizona, in 1920, to a devout Mormon family,
Thiebaud grew up in the western United States. As a teenager in
Long Beach, he worked briefly in the animation department of Walt Disney studios.
After a stint in the Army Air Forces, he worked as a cartoonist and layout
designer for Rexall Drugs in Los Angeles.
Encouraged by a Rexall colleague, Thiebaud left southern California and studied
fine art at what was then Sacramento State College. While still a student he
was offered a teaching job at Sacramento City College, where he was a member of
the faculty for 10 years. In 1960, he joined the art department at the
University of California, Davis.
According to art critic John Hughes: "(Thiebaud) started off in the 1960s
painting gorgeously lush still lifes of kitsch diner food--everything from hot
dogs to angel-food cake and gumballs (see Illustration 1). Then he turned to
painting people, or
rather embalming them in his characteristic thick, smooth and (when used to make
flesh) slightly rubbery pigment. After moving to San Francisco in the early
'70s, he took his eye outside and did cityscapes--those strange, plunging
perspectives of the hills and highways of the city, translated into gravity-defying
slices, with cars clinging to the asphalt like flies to a wall . . ."
"Most recently, after a move out of San Francisco in the mid-'90s, Thiebaud
embarked on a series of brightly colored, sharply divided, wildly patterned
landscapes of the Sacramento River delta, seen from way up, as though from a
plane--for example, River and Farms, 1996. Of his relationship to
these recent riverscapes, Thiebaud said, "When I was between the ages of 10 and
13, we moved to southern Utah, to a big ranch, and did a lot of farming.
I plowed, harrowed, dug and hitched up teams. I planted and harvested alfalfa,
potatoes, and corn . . . and I loved it. It was a great way to grow up.
These paintings have something to do with the love of the land, in some ways,
the idea of replicating that experience."
Thiebaud has had several major exhibitions, including a recent retrospective
which toured much of the United States before ending at New York City's Whitney
Museum of American Art. At first linked with the Pop movement, over time Thiebaud
has proved to be more of a traditional painter in the tradition of
Jan Vermeer, Diego Velazquez and Jean Simeon Chardin. But Thiebaud's Pop image
dies hard. A 2001 Time magazine article about him was titled:
"The Poet of Pastry." Ironically, in the article, John Hughes argued that
Thiebaud has risen above his Pop art image.
 | Source |
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| | Hughes, Robert. 2001. "The Poet of Pastry", Time, July 16, pp. 66-67. |
