A Lesson from Wayne Thiebaud

Wayne Thiebaud is an American painter whose works are focused on intimate associations with everyday things like bakeries, mountains, roads, and so on. He orchestrates shapes and colours into various configurative potentials as he deals with the inner workings of a painting such as "its thrusts, its spatial illusionism, the coherence with which we judge balance, symmetry, tension, and grace."

I like Wayne Thiebaud’s works and his idea about painting. He appreciates the beauty of the mundane, uses colours harmoniously, and makes a composition uniquely. His works definitely supply us with what we are missing from life: appreciation and balance. I feel that his paintings help us not to lose hope, not to make prejudiced judgements, and not to be desensitized by familiarity. Therefore, I find it is worth paying attention to what he says about painting.

He is truly an advocate of painting, saying that painting is "a kind of miracle that reduces a three-dimensional world of living chaos into a little, flat, unmoving thing that is able to speak to you in some ways." Though some people say painting is dead because it is silent and doesn't move, he thinks it can be alive for someone as the bible stories are considered real to the believers.

He made a fundamental point for the validity of painting that "it is a metaphor of our body" for there are physical gestures and the rhythms of our body involved. Painting brings about a kind of "intersubjective experience" so-called empathy that is a crucial element to make a culture. He said that "the idea of feel is crucial to the idea of making painting live."

He advises that painters have to make sure they don't become "an art world employee" who manufactures products lightly and repetitively. Many influential painters try to find several perceptual images, nuances, multiple perspectives so that they can develop alternatives to our world. In this way, the range of painting gets limitless. Interestingly, we have a "physiological capacity to see things and make them into something from our own experience, associations, emotion." Ultimately, painting is about using the capacity.

<Source: Elson Lecture: The Painted World in 2000 & the Academy of Achievement Interview in 2011>