Wayne Thiebaud Interview (page: 4 / 6) Painter and Teacher	Print Interview

Is creativity something that one can teach?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Wayne Thiebaud: I have no idea. I think maybe there can be issues where examples can be shown of... maybe how to work, how to think, how to criticize, and the challenge of not doing something which is known, but something which is unknown. I think creativity is a very mysterious idea. But if you are interested in creativity, then I think the fundamentals of learning and criticizing are essential.

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

Some people think it's the ability to quiet the critic within us that enables us to be creative or to let go, but you're saying that the critic also has to be engaged in a way. Isn't that a difficult paradox?

Wayne Thiebaud: I don't think so, because...

Get the Flash Player to see this video. If you're engaged, as you say, you're working, theoretically, so hard that you're willing to make mistakes, and you know that doing something once is never enough. As Degas says, "If you start drawing, be sure you draw it ten times." Correct it over and over again -- even a hundred times -- to get to that ballet slipper fitting on the shoe properly. In that instance, I think you don't think of creativity so much, because what you're doing is creating all the time. Some of it not very good, but it's a creation nonetheless, and the nerve of failure I think is paramount. Learning by mistakes. Modifying, reconstituting, reorganizing, over and over again.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

You've been known to go back to paintings that you've finished and rework them.

Wayne Thiebaud: Almost always. A miracle occurs often, when something happens and you almost feel you had nothing to do with it. It's just suddenly there.

As if from outside you?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Wayne Thiebaud: I'm one sort of against mysteriousness about painting. But it's there somewhere. But when you think about it, painting itself is a kind of miracle, because what you're doing is reducing a three-dimensional world of living, active organized chaos into this little, flat, unmoving, quiet, flat thing, which has to, in some ways, be able to speak to you. Interviewer: So in a way you can never perfectly reach that? Wayne Thiebaud: I don't think so. I don't think perfection is a very interesting thing, because we are all imperfect. And that's quite wonderful, because it's what we call human.

[ Key to Success ] Vision

Your own paintings are now worth millions. How does that feel?

Wayne Thiebaud: Puzzling and curiously unreal. Something which you never ever would think of it ever occurring. Dangerous, in a sense of over-celebration. Unreal, in terms of value structure. Obviously it's going to change, if we look carefully. If we're interested at all, that kind of interest goes up and down, like the stock market, sometimes to disastrous results, in many instances. So I think it's a fascinating phenomenon. Interesting, but very puzzling and very temporary, I think.

You've said that no painter is ever satisfied completely with a work of art, and that it's the next painting that attracts his or her attention.

Wayne Thiebaud: I think so, yes. I think any painters that I admire and am interested in -- which occupy positions of achievements in a consensus way -- most of them are kind of always hanging on by their fingertips, hoping that the next painting will be better, where they can finally get that vision that they have in their mind.

Is that part of creativity in a way, the striving to get there the next time?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Wayne Thiebaud: I think it's the quest and the challenge that keeps you going. When you get to a point of where you can do something, somehow, that you feel you can do, and you anticipate the end result, it's no longer very interesting. You've got to, I think, risk making a terrible painting, or a terrible idea, and see what you can do with it. And it's often disastrous. I mean, if you can get one painting out of 12 or 15, that's a very high batting average, and you better look to yourself to be a little bit more... editing. And you see, one of the problems with painters is we don't have editors like you do. We know and you know how important editors are, and have been. So we then have to, I think, really move to critical confrontation, in order to somehow, hopefully ensure that you're not degrading your work, being repetitive, becoming a kind of art world employee where you're expected to make these light manufacturing products. I think that's a kind of death.

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

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