On Christmas day a week or two ago, an American painter named Wayne Thiebaud died at 101. I had never heard of Thiebaud, nor can I remember ever seeing any of his work. Which, now that I have, feels like a fatal flaw in my two years of higher art education.
I’d like to write a full piece on Wayne Thiebaud, but today I’m just going to point at some of the pieces that stopped me in my tracks the other day as I was poking around his past. Specifically his landscapes. Not the subject matter he became famous for, but certainly the subject matter that ensnared my imagination.
Look at how soft those clouds look!
These works feel like glorious caricatures of space. Caricatures of land. And that’s something I’ve never seen before. And I love it.
And now I’m going to let this all percolate and soak into my subconscious and see what comes out.