Wayne Thiebaud Quotes about Art

Wayne Thiebaud was a famous American painter, draftsman and printmaker loosely associated with the Pop art movement. He is best known for his colorful depictions of cakes, pastries, candy, and items from popular culture. Famous Wayne Thiebaud artworks include “Two Paint Cans”, “Four Pinball Machines”, “Encased Cakes”, “Pie Counter”, “Valley Streets”, “Three Machines”, “Sunset Streets”, “Flatland River” and “Girl with Ice Cream Cone”.

Mini biography: Born Morton Wayne Thiebaud on the 15th of November, 1920 in Mesa, Arizona, United States of America. His mother was Alice Eugenia Le Baron and his father Morton Thiebaud was a bishop for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Thiebaud married Patricia Patterson in 1943 and they divorced in 1959. He married his second wife Betty Jean Thiebaud in 1959. Thiebaud had three children: Twinka Thiebaud, Paul Thiebaud, and Mallary Ann Thiebaud. The artist died on the 25th of December, 2001 in Sacramento, California, USA at the age of 101. Wayne Thiebaud is buried at the Odd Fellows Lawn Cemetery and Mausoleum, Sacramento, California, United States.

List of Famous Wayne Thiebaud Art Quotes

I would like the painting to create its own light. Wayne Thiebaud

The art world is not much interested in humor, to its disadvantage. Wayne Thiebaud

Teaching was my education, I just went in because if I was going to try to be a painter I had to make a living, but it turned out I was very intrigued with it. Wayne Thiebaud

I’ve never thought of myself as a card-carrying Pop Artist; in fact, I’m much more interested in that long tradition of Realist painting. I’m particularly interested in ways that Realism and Abstraction are combined in various ways. Pop Art, I have not much interest in it; I’m not a big fan of it, partly because I worked in commercial art, I see it more as an adjunct of that. Wayne Thiebaud

I’d been working in food, washing dishes. That was my environment. I remember seeing pies laid out, processed food that I’d worked on, so I started painting these triangles and turning them into pies. Wayne Thiebaud

Photography starts with everything while painting starts with nothing to make something. Wayne Thiebaud

Actually, while I was doing still lives I was at the same time trying to do figures, but very unsuccessfully. I was doing them concurrent with my food paintings in 1962, but in 1963 I decided to concentrate on figures for awhile. I think an artist’s capacity to handle the figure is a great test of his abilities. Wayne Thiebaud

I don’t have much to do with realism; there’s a big difference between realism and representation. Wayne Thiebaud

I have a great regard for commercial art. Those wonderful people showed me what to do – sign painters, women’s fashion illustrators. There’s a lot of craft in it, and that’s admirable. Wayne Thiebaud

They just have to fall in love and go to work. That’s enough. Wayne Thiebaud

Photography, as I see it, is made from everything into something. Painting starts with nothing and has to find something. So in a way, photographs are made from the outside in, and painting is made from the inside out, and for me, at least seems to miss that very important aspect of Empathy in Painting. Wayne Thiebaud

The desperate thing for me with the white background was to try to achieve some kind of transition. It came out of the tradition of painting like Van Gogh, who would have a cadmium red-orange line around this side and then cerulean blue on the other edge. Wayne Thiebaud

I avoid it like the plague; you can tell immediately, even a sniff of photography will show up. You would think it would help, but it’s absolutely the opposite. Photography is not like the way we see at all. Because we’re seeing with two eyes all the time, and that is a human view rather than a mechanical view. Photography, television, video have taken us over, but that’s fortunate in a way because it’s left painting alone as painting, preserved its uniqueness. Wayne Thiebaud

Degas made it awkward for himself, you know, something like eighteen figures over here and then a watering can over there. In a sense, it’s a kind of melodramatic desperate act, but it works. His compositions depend on these extremes and challenging juxtapositions. Wayne Thiebaud

Wayne Thiebaud Self-Portrait Painting

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