Wayne Thiebaud was born in Arizona in 1920. Wayne Thiebaud is an artist that has been associated with the Pop Art culture and was part of the realism that came out of the United States west coast. Thiebaud’s real-life representation of his subject has been seen as one of many beginnings’ photorealism. Before he become a painter, Thiebaud worked in New York City as a sign painter and as a cartoonist. He merely began to paint in 1949, integrating accomplishments from his former business. Thiebaud is best known for the picture that are associated with the line of objects that can be found in diners and cafeterias, such as pies and pastries and others objects of common everyday life. The Neapolitan Pie that I found in the Norton Museum embraces the techniques that he often used in his paintings.
This picture with its thick paint adding to the deepness and character led me to desire to learn about the creative person behind it. Thiebaud chose to observe and encompass delectation of the common topographic point and rendered his realistic paintings with a “brilliant eye for abstraction.” Thiebaud’s picture/painting technique can be described as a “cookbook chronicling those that have added sizzle, seasoning or even sprinkle to its prolific palette” What he wanted to set out to do was to create a different visual species, which he described as being the ultimate accomplishment for all painters. Thiebaud says that art needs constant movement of different aspects of itself to stay alive. He also states that art draws inspiration from everything around it. He is not afraid of showing in his paintings aspects from other artists who inspired him, “My world is one crime. I steal from every artist around the world.”
This may be why Thiebaud completely followed artists that were before him and also artists who were painting in his time period. Wayne Thiebaud had many artists in Abstract Expressionism and creative persons from Pop Art that he gathered techniques from. There were artistic clips periods that he borrowed facets from and combined with others to produce his own characteristic manner. In this paper I will depict all these aspects and how their combination gave rise to the celebrated work we know Wayne Thiebaud for today’s society. Thiebaud was a realist painter and painted at a clip between Abstract Expressionism motion, and the Pop Art epoch. His growing as a creative person started from when he was an immature kid and as an adolescent made posting designs and on stage sets for theatre. Thiebaud worked at Universal Studios and besides as an illustrator for the advertisement section in New York. He later earned a degree from California State College in Sacramento and this was where he learned and became fond of the right humanistic disciples. After this he began to study art history books intensively and the picture in them, including the passage in the works from period to period. Thiebaud, while working, became friends with and interested in the works of art from Willem De Kooning and Franz Kline who were abstract expressionist painters.
This was a “American station World War II art motion.” the predecessor of this art motion is surrealism, which features elements of surprise and unexpected appositions. Willem De Kooning also was involved with action picture, whose characteristics are spontaneous, splashed, or smeared onto canvas. Kooning provinces, “People are always trying to break the backs of paintings by expecting things which paintings cannot do. it’s just a painting. A God damned painting. Just a little thing you smear stuff on. You just hope in the smearing that you haven’t insulted people that you’re asking to look at it.” This statement was a great influence in determining the thoughts of Thiebaud. He saw this as a quintessential idea for bring forthing of art. By the early 1960’s the picture he had produced now began to gain tension, balance, and grace. He placed the signifiers first and objects were pushed forward and put in a relevant order. He had been doing statements like this with his Neapolitan Pie for years before others but was packed together with other artists in the Pop Art period when the movement surfaced.
Pop Art was a tradition that challenged the graphics at that time and wanted to show that anything the creative person, which was of mass-production of popular culture could can be connected with fined art. It was widely seen as a reaction and expansion of the dominant ideas of abstract realism, which was a spontaneous or subconscious creation. Pop Art does not refer directly to the art that they made, but the ideas that moved the whole motion itself. During this time, Thiebaud also saw works of art from the earliest pop artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns whose paintings were based on Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. What Thiebaud did was abandoned most of the ideas that Popped Art committed itself to and react against it, which is surprising since he was seen as a vital part to this period. The work that Thiebaud produced is described as “nostalgic views of popular culture and the American scene with which viewers of all kinds can easily identify.” Most paintings in the Pop Art period were more intimidating for those viewing the work in museums and sometimes were too harsh to appreciate. What Thiebaud said was “I am not a card carrying Pop artist. I don’t like much of it.” Pop to him was more of a business than an operation of honorable painting and he had too much respect for the original products that they played off of to be a part of Pop Art. So while this art period was taking off Thiebaud decided that he was going to move on and became a professor at U-C Davis. “When I painted the first row of pies, I can retrieve sitting and laughing – sort of a silly relief – ‘Now I have flipped out!’ The one thing that allowed me to make that was holding been a cartoonist. I did one and thought, “That’s really crazy, but no one is going to look at these things anyway, so what the heck.”
However with all of his pastry pictures he handled the paint in a manner that makes his work very distinctive. His picture/paintings bring forth a realism of complete visual delight. He made anew the representational capable affair with a bold palette and used his skillful display of brushwork acquired from the Abstract Expressionists he admired. Wayne Thiebaud copied from the Masters because he respected art so much that he wanted to learn from those greats that came before him. What he did was add his own manner/style to it so as to spread out on what he learned into a different class, so as to be seen in a new light. He delighted in the works of other art periods like Abstract Expressionism and Realism and saw it as an honour to study an be apart of the art movement. He rejected the ideas of the Pop Art movement that he was classified in because he respected the art work they ridiculed too much to make a mockery of it. He was said as feeling honoured that he was able to apply himself and that he became a force in the artistic movement that is still evolving today. His work will forever be a staple and used as a tool for creative person that come behind him to study learn from and lucubrate on.
