see A Small List of Great Artists : Wayne Thiebaud (American, 1920-2021)
I was fortunate to take a few classes from Wayne Thiebaud at UC Davis, but even though I really enjoyed his classes, most of the time that I was there, – and even though I think back now about how much I learned that to this day still affects the ways I think about art – I sadly didn’t truly comprehend or appreciate who he was or his importance to my artistic growth or to art history until much later. I was just a dumb kid!
I had a roommate, and we had a running gag, where after class, I would say, “I just got back from class with the Famous Wayne Thiebaud,” or “Today, in class, the Famous Wayne Thiebaud said…” And so on.
There was one point where I didn’t get into a class of Thiebaud’s that I wanted, so I went to the office and got a form that would need to be signed by Thiebaud in order for me to get into the class. I took the form to Thiebaud and handed it to him with a pen and asked, “Could I get your autograph?” He gave me a look, and I could tell he was non-plussed – but he signed the sheet and I got into his class.
There was another point when he was releasing a new art book of his work, and he had a signing, and some of my fellow students popped out, bought his book, and got it signed. The next day at school, they brought their copies to share and look through, and I looked through and thought, that’s kind of neat, but I didn’t feel much regret for not buying one myself and getting it signed.
Flipping through these books, there were images of pies, and cakes, and dresses, and none of this art really spoke to me at the time. But there were a few images he had done of San Francisco city scapes, and I was thinking, What in the %&!$# are these?? These don’t look anything like all those pies and cakes! These are really amazing. Holy ?%&$#$!, I could get into these!
And then at some point, some art student friends and I popped down to San Francisco for a day at the art museums, and here were a few of these on the walls of these museums! And holy f&$%-ing !%@&?? again, these were pretty F?$#&-ing amazing! This is the same guy who did all those pies??
Here’s a great article on how Thiebaud’s San Francisco cityscapes came to be, and more, in the San Francisco Chronicle!
These city scapes are the art of his that really speaks to me, and absolutely floors me every time I see them, still. And he made such a huge body of work for this series. He began creating them in ernest in the 1970’s, and continued producing them for the rest of his life – fifty years. What an amazing bunch of paintings! I don’t get tired of them. He absolutely captured the impossibly over-crowded, dizzying, crazily-steep, illogically-perspectived streets of San Francisco.
When Thiebaud turned one hundred years old, his local museum, The Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento hosted an exhibit to commemorate his work. The pandemic struck while the show was touring, and he passed away during that time, and as things opened up again, the show returned to the Crocker. My best friend, Corey Okada, wrote a blog about his visit to the show, and casually mentioned how Thiebaud’s city scapes share “an exaggeration of verticality” with Asian landscape paintings. I don’t know how I didn’t think about this before! Thiebaud’s city scapes are total modern progressions of an Asian landscape. Your eye can walk the path of these ultra-engaging and very enterable; you can just get absorbed in and lost in the reality it creates and invites you explore, and travel through them in all the same ways. But instead of mountains and trees cut through with dirt pathways sparcely populated with occasional tiny huts or people on mules, it’s mountains of sky scrapers cut through with crazily steep highways populated by tiny little cars.
Read the comic book, “Brush with Peril”:
BACK TO MASTER LIST
Small List of Great Artists
Small List of Museums