Wayne Thiebaud Interview (page: 5 / 6) Painter and Teacher	Print Interview

What was your own feeling about the works of some of your contemporaries, Andy Warhol for instance, which looked quite a bit like commercial art?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Wayne Thiebaud: I had no interest at all, because I thought the commercial artists were much better than he was, and still feel that way. I think the lessons and the influence and the quality of pop art has to be seriously addressed in reality. For those people who gave them their appropriation -- styles which they took, as they admit -- those people deserve also a great deal of credit as great designers, great cartoonists, great photographers. I think that needs to be addressed in terms of the effect and quality achievement and philosophic equipment of pop art. I'm a kind of heretic, I guess, but I'm not very interested in pop art.

But you were touched by some other contemporaneous painters, Richard Diebenkorn, for instance.

Wayne Thiebaud: Yes, very much, very much.

Could you tell us how they affected you?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Wayne Thiebaud: Well, there are great lessons and great influences and I've actually stolen things from them. I do try to do what they do. De Kooning in terms of his premier coup bravura painting. That's a long, long tradition starting with Velasquez, through Manet to Soutine. De Kooning, Manet, where they have to juggle simultaneously several perceptual images at once and make a coalescent form, which encases and combines those perceptual nuances all at once. That's why they make so many failures of course. Interviewer: Hard to do. Wayne Thiebaud: Yeah. Oh, practically impossible.

Your cityscapes, scenes of San Francisco, seem to combine different perspectives in one image.

Wayne Thiebaud: Yes. Those were other influences, influences of Oriental painting, a Chinese tradition where you're trying to integrate several projective systems into one.

What is a projective system?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Wayne Thiebaud: A single point perspective, where you look at a railroad track, that's one system. Two-point perspective is when you have two-point perspective. Cezanne's paintings have eight or nine perspectives, various views of the same still life viewed from several angles and trying to incorporate that into one. Chinese perspective -- which is the opposite of one-point perspective -- where instead of the railroad tracks vanishing, they're coming into you. And to orchestrate those into one entity is a wonderful challenge and a great treat to fool around with, mostly unsuccessfully, but wonderfully exciting.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

I read that you had a breakthrough when, instead of painting directly from an intersection in San Francisco, you made a series of drawings or watercolors, sort of put a bunch of different aspects together.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Wayne Thiebaud: Back into the studio and began just to use these various paintings from various points of view and trying to -- I was trying to get the feeling of equilibrium and disequilibrium, because you feel that in, I think, San Francisco. It's hard to imagine how those cars can stay on the street, or buildings can suddenly thrust themselves up on a kind of... what seems to be an earth mound. It just makes you feel, "This can't work." So that was very much a part, at least, of the ideas I wanted to try to get into it. I think it has to do, again, with what we talked about with body empathy. It helps to enliven. What you have to do with a painting is to enliven it with your body, to feel its tensions, to feel its dislocation or to feel its comfort. "Gee, this feels really stable," for instance. On the other hand, if it's a little too stable it can die on you. So it's a wonderful tightrope walk. Interviewer: There is some humor in these paintings too, isn't there? Wayne Thiebaud: I hope so, yeah, after all I'm an old cartoonist and love cartoons. Critics don't realize when they talk about them as sort of cartoony that that's a great compliment to me. I collect all those old guys and have a great admiration and love for them.

Wayne Thiebaud Interview, Page: 1   2   3   4   5   6