Monday, October 17, 2011

Wayne Thiebaud, Painter of...Cakes



Love this guy.  I told my kids about him in my art classes this week, and for the rest of you - enjoy! Thiebaud was born in 1920 and is still alive. 

A few of his quotes below:
 Art is one of the dirtiest words in our language; it’s mucked up with all kinds of meanings.  There’s the art of plumbing, there’s the art of almost anything that you can say.  My own sense of it is that it means something very rare, an extraordinary achievement.  It’s not delivered like the morning paper, it has to be stolen from Mount Olympus.

The more I drew, the more I improved.

Painting is life for me.  It is a kind of miracle.

Find something you want to paint.  Something you really love.

Almost everything I’ve done I’ll go back to and do again.

You have to take some chances.

Wanting to rise above the ordinary, Wayne Thiebaud said: ‘I tried to steal every kind of idea – Western, Eastern – and the use of everything I could think of.  Size differences, color differences… exaggeration.’

I try to find things to paint which I feel have been overlooked.

What I couldn’t get over was that all the illustrators and commercial artists I admired most were crazy about the old masters.

2 comments:

  1. Thank you for posting the video and quotes. It's been a hard year.
    It's reassuring to see him still working at 81 with both his sense of humor and humility intact. Give me courage to keep on making my art.

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  2. Yeah, he encourages me, too. An art critic said at one point in his career that he must be the hungriest artist in California. I bet THAT was encouraging! Sheesh! We just have to keep going!

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