BORROWING ART

During a trip to Chicago several years ago, I stood over a bridge and looked down on the busy street below. The street extended to the horizon and the perspective reminded me of Wayne Thiebaud's city paintings with streets that look like they are hanging off a cliff. Thiebaud doesn't use traditional perspective in his cityscapes. Instead, he abstracts the images into geometric shapes. The streets look like they run straight down a cliff with only a rectangle at the bottom to keep them from falling off the page. I took a quick photo because I thought the photo would help me paint the scene.  I wanted to try something similar to Thiebaud's. but make my painting with one-point perspective. That would be a challenge for me. I've never had the patience to draw street scenes using perspective as a guide. My lines tend to waver and wander over the page instead of making the precise, crisp lines drawn with a ruler. I tried painting this scene several times without much success.

Wayne Thiebaud might have said to me, "An artist needs the best studio instruction, the most rigorous demands, and the toughest criticism in order to tune up his sensibilities."

A friend and I went to the Thiebaud exhibit that is now on view at the Legion of Honor Museum near the Presidio in San Francisco. In my lifetime, I have been to many exhibits of both very familiar and unknown artists. Though I knew about Thiebaud and his bold images, this exhibit surprised me and made me want to linger over each part of the exhibit. Thiebaud was an artist and also a favorite teacher at UC Davis for many years. He believed in borrowing ideas from other artists, learning their techniques by copying their work, and translating those ideas into his paintings.

He once said, "If you stare at an object, as you do when you paint, there is no point at which you stop learning from it."

The exhibit explains Thiebaud's thinking about borrowing art. Each section shows work by other artists and then paintings done in the same style by Thiebaud. His painting, Art Comes from Art, is a tour de force of that practice. On four open shelves sit twelve paintings, each seemingly by a different artist. Instead, each small painting was copied exactly by Thiebaud, yet also includes his signature techniques: vivid colors outlining objects, starkness, bold shadows that lend mystery to the painting, and lavish use of paint. The backgrounds of many of his paintings are often bold whites with different undertones.

Art Comes from Art by Wayne Thiebaud

Sometimes Thiebaud is classified as a Pop Artist because he often painted ordinary objects such as gumball machines or a slice of pie or cake. Instead of the flat, printed images of Pop Art though, Thiebaud uses gobs of paint to show the lushness of the cake's icing and surrounds the object with thickly applied colors. Thiebaud spent time during the '60s with Jaspar Johns, Richard Diebenkorn, and other contemporary artists. I am sure all their ideas about art rubbed off on each other.

Thiebaud often painted portraits of people based on a similar portrait done by an artist from a previous time. If you've seen his portraits, you could compare them to Edward Hopper's way of presenting a person starkly alone. Some of his style may have rubbed off on someone like Amy Sherald, known for her portrait of Michelle Obama, who paints portraits using the same strong, intense images and facial expressions and sense of being alone as Thiebaud.

After the museum visit, I pulled out my sketchbook and decided to try the Chicago street scene again. This time I made more of an effort to use one-point perspective. As I drew I thought of Thiebaud's paintings and how in control he was of each image. As I worked, I thought, "Here I am taking a lesson from Thiebaud. I'm copying his style."

Wayne Thiebaud said about this practice, "I believe very much in the tradition that art comes from art and nothing else. Art for me simply means doing something extraordinarily well...."

To see more of Thiebaud's work, go to:

https://www.acquavellagalleries.com/artists/wayne-thiebaud

or tour the Legion of Honor while the Wayne Thiebaud exhibit is on view: today through August 17.

Find more quotes by Thiebaud here:

https://www.azquotes.com/author/43221-Wayne_Thiebaud

Compare Amy Sherald's work to Wayne Thiebaud's here:

https://whitney.org/exhibitions/amy-sherald

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Read the New York Times' informative article about Pope Francis' favorite painting:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/24/arts/pope-francis-caravaggio.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare