![]() See the edges of objects wobble, come in and out of focus, flowing one into another, all in this strong graphic field that releases dopamine rushes of pleasure. “The more ways you can put together in a picture … the richer it becomes, the more like life.” He is most widely known for his juicy pictures of voluptuous confectionary in shop displays and on countertops. There’s peripheral vision, the myopic close-up sensation, focused seeing,” and went on to list the glance, stare, squint, and closed-eye daydreaming. He told the New York Times, “I don’t agree with Duchamp that the eye is a dumb organ … I think the eye has a mind of its own and there are different ways we see. He asked if I would like to play tennis with him (he played his whole life). Afterward, he told me he felt this work in his nerves and muscles. I showed slides of emerging artists like Matthew Barney, Janine Antoni, Chris Ofili, Kara Walker, Robert Gober, and Jeff Koons, and he was rapt. But it felt off to one side, not as edgy or relevant to the moment as someone around his age, who also painted in California, and in his own colorful idiom: David Hockney. Until that moment, however, I’d never really thought about his work much. I met him, once, when I lectured in the 1990s at UC Davis. He told students who didn’t want to learn these, “It would be great if you could make a brilliant end run around all that stuff, but with painting there’s no such thing …” To this he added the formalism and oddity of Morandi’s still lifes, the intimacies of Chardin, and techniques of the old masters. He combined this with the painterly West Coast figuration of his peers like David Park, the abstraction of Richard Diebenkorn, and the materiality of ceramicists like Peter Voulkos and Robert Arneson. (Bruce Nauman was his student.) At this distance from New York, sifting through a raft of influences and art history with one of the most distinctive optical styles in all of American painting, Thiebaud synthesized Pop Art’s everyday commodity culture, strong color, ironies, and commercial realism. He spent nearly the entirety of his 101 years in California, specifically in Sacramento. That both were younger than him tells you he wasn’t stuck in any ideological aesthetic rut. Thiebaud was born in Arizona and lived for a time in New York, where he tried to shop his illustrations and commercial art knew de Kooning, Kline, Guston, and Barnett Newman and was taken by the new energies in artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Following brushstrokes, lulled from surface to surface, you experience a release of internal rapture from form. His hallucinatory surfaces, uncanny perceptual intelligence, thick buildups of rich color, hard light, luminosity, tonal control, and Hopperesque remove create eye-worms that make you meld with the paintings, participate in how they were made. Wayne Thiebaud’s paintings of cakes, bathers, landscapes, paint cans, pastries, and cityscapes represent a luscious American sublime.Ĭalling him a “California painter,” as many do, would be like calling Albert Pinkham Ryder a “New York painter.” Thiebaud’s work is universal.
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