Wayne thiebaud education

Best known for his paintings of cakes, pies, pastries, and toys, Wayne Thiebaud hadn't planned on becoming a visual artist. He apprenticed as a cartoonist at Walt Disney studios and intended to work as a commercial illustrator, but his friend Robert Mallary turned him towards a career in fine art. Thiebaud was friendly with Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, but avoided their Abstract Expressionism in favor of a figural style. Though Thiebaud is most often grouped with the Pop art movement for his subject matter, the artist considers himself "just an old fashioned painter," and "not a card carrying Pop artist." He remains best known for his still lifes of confections—sometimes painted from his own memories—which he considers interpretations of "Americanness." In his works, objects and their shadows are characteristically outlined in multiple colors, creating a visual effect Thiebaud calls akin to vibration.

Summary of Wayne Thiebaud

While rooted in the everyday, West Coast artist Wayne Thiebaud's compositions spring from his imagination and have a poetic, sometimes melancholic, quality about them. Thiebaud bucked artistic trends to create his own vision of American culture. Trained as a commercial artist and uninterested in the histrionics surrounding Abstract Expressionism, Thiebaud concentrated his attention on ordinary objects, thus garnering comparisons to Pop Art of the 1960s, yet Thiebaud brushed away such comparisons, saying he was "just an old-fashioned painter."

A popular teacher, Thiebaud was a generous mentor, and artists such as Mel Ramos, Fritz Scholder, and Faith Bromberg have spoken his praises. Further, Thiebaud's embrace of Americana - as seen through his bakery cases and landscapes - has endeared him to a wider audience that see something of themselves in his paintings.

Accomplishments

• Thiebaud began his artistic path studying commercial art and illustration before turning to fine arts study, and this early training continues to inform his work. The linear,
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  Wayne Thiebaud

  Crosscurrents: Modern Art from the Sam Rose and Julie Walters Collection

  In eighty-eight striking paintings and sculptures, Crosscurrents captures modernism as it moved from early abstractions by O’Keeffe, to Picasso and Pollock in midcentury, to pop riffs on contemporary culture by Roy Lichtenstein, Wayne Thiebaud, and Tom Wesselmann—all illustrating the complexity and energy of a distinctly American modernism.

  Graphic Masters: Highlights from the Smithsonian American Art Museum

  Graphic Masters celebrates the extraordinary variety and accomplishment of American artists’ works on paper. Exceptional watercolors, pastels, and drawings from the 1860s through the 1990s reveal the central importance of works on paper for American artists, both as studies for creations in other media and as finished works of art. Traditionally a more intimate form of expression than painting or sculpture, drawings often reveal greater spontaneity and experimentation. Even as works on paper become larger and more finished, competing in scale with easel paintings, they retain