The Language of Vision

Yesterday's images of flaming birthday cakes and this new photo of Cinque Terre by Elizabeth inspire me to share the work of an American master of color and light — painter and teacher Wayne Thiebaud.

Here's yet another field trip to add to the summer calendar!
Wayne Thiebaud: Seventy Years of Painting at the San Jose Museum of Art.
Watch the stream of the San Jose Museum's interview, Wayne Thiebaud in conversation with Susan Krane, Oshman Executive Director, and you get a good sense of Mr. Thiebaud's incredible work ethic, and his delightful sense of honesty, humility and humor.

In the interview, he talks about how artists borrow and steal from the past masters, in order to be apart of the larger tradition of painting. Thiebaud refers to museums as "these exotic wonderlands of who we are." Every now and then someone comes along who manages to put their own unique twist on what's been done and comes up with a "language of vision" that is completely their own. As he says, you take a trip to the museum and then you walk outside and the trees all start looking like Van Gogh's trees. Go to the museum to look at Thiebaud's "repertory company" of cakes and pies, streets and signs. If you are lucky, every trip to the bakery and drive down a steep San Francisco hill will look start to look and feel like a Thiebaud painting.

I was fortunate be a student in both an art studio class and an aesthetics class at UC Davis with the Professor. He taught us about artmaking through doing, with very specific painting exercises that forced us to struggle the confounding problems of translating the three-dimensional world onto that blank, white, two-dimensional canvas. Paint an object using only tones of white — or black. Draw everything around an object. Study reflections. Paint the shadows. Select 6 masterworks that you admire and paint them into a single composition. My understanding of Wayne Thiebaud as an artist is truly aligned with light. I would watch him explore the qualities of light, painting with us in studio for hours during the day, and hear how he would end the day, asleep on the couch — his open sketchbook filled with his pencil studies of the old masters illuminated under a standing lamp. It was clear that that he believed that artists should be forever learning, a perpetual blend of teacher and student. He learned from the everyman and everywomen — sign painters, cartoonists, graphic designers and illustrators. He learned from a repertory of masters who were driven to create things of substance - Disney, Herriman, Hopper, Bonnard, Cassatt, Matisse, Morandi, Picasso, Rembrandt, Albers and De Kooning (an eclectic cadre of artists referenced in this interview).

When Thiebaud says, "Imagine what the world would be like if everyone could draw or paint," he's on to something. We all deserve the gift of slow living — to be able to make and get lost in these reconstructed worlds of color and light is nothing short of magical. Professor Thiebaud surely taught me that art "reminds us of what we want to be, what we could be, what we should be, and what we might be..."

"Painting and drawing is something you can enjoy without it having to be art or worrying about it being art... Everybody should have that priviledge and that great way of knowing things."
A Wayne Thiebaud quote from Delicious: The Art and Life of Wayne Thiebaud by Susan Goldman Rubin