Wayne thiebaud website

While rooted in the everyday, West Coast artist Wayne Thiebaud's compositions spring from his imagination and have a poetic, sometimes melancholic, quality about them. Thiebaud bucked artistic trends to create his own vision of American culture. Trained as a commercial artist and uninterested in the histrionics surrounding Abstract Expressionism , Thiebaud concentrated his attention on ordinary objects, thus garnering comparisons to Pop Art of the s, yet Thiebaud brushed away such comparisons, saying he was "just an old-fashioned painter.

Further, Thiebaud's embrace of Americana - as seen through his bakery cases and landscapes - has endeared him to a wider audience that see something of themselves in his paintings. An orderly array of cakes sit atop cake stands as if in a baker's display case. The overlapping cakes and their shadows create a tight, gridded composition that feels static, and yet the thin cake stands hardly seem capable of holding up the sumptuously decorated cakes, threatening the possibility of toppled pastries.

Thiebaud compresses, or flattens, the space by using a simple, monochrome background, barely distinguishing between the wall and the surface on which the cakes sit, as well as employing a skewed perspective. This space combined with a limited palette of subdued pastel shades, with a few red, pink, and yellow accents, creates a unified composition.

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While most of the cakes are differently decorated, save the two in the center, the overall effect is of similarity and repetition. The use of solid outlines and shadows on a stark background is typical of Thiebaud's work in the s, which has much in common with advertising images, and its subject matter - common consumer items - aligns it with much of Pop Art, but its thickly applied paint sets it apart from much of the movement.

Curator Megan Fizell writes, "The frosting upon Wayne Thiebaud's painting, Cakes , is so thickly applied that I am often tempted to reach out, run my finger along one of the perfect cake-tops to taste the sugary dessert. To further compound this tendency, American artist Sharon Core recreated the painting as a still life and then photographed it.

To achieve the look of the heavy brushstrokes, she replicated the effect in frosting - thus completing the cycle of imitation between the subject and its representation. Thiebaud's daughter, Twinka, wearing a simple green dress, sits on a stool, holding a piece of paper, perhaps a work of art. She casts a slight shadow on the cream-colored floor and wall, and she looks out toward the viewer.

Thiebaud uses a repeating color palette to create a harmonious composition; the emerald of the dress is used in the sitter's cheekbone, the orange of the stool reappears in the hem of the outfit and the paper she holds and is similar to the color of her hair. Thiebaud's second wife, Betty Jean, described Thiebaud's approach to portraiture, saying, "The muteness of figures reduces them to objectness.