Wayne Thiebaud Essay

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Wayne Thiebaud was born on 15th November 1920 in Arizona (U.S.A.) and is 90 years of age. He is most famous for his colourful pieces depicting everyday objects in American culture, particularly food, and for his pieces on landscapes and figures. His pieces are painted or print made. In an interview, he said: ‘..Then at the end of 1959 or so I began to be interested in a formal approach to composition. I’d been painting gumball machines, windows, counters, and at that point began to rework paintings into much more clearly identified objects. I tried to see if I could get an object to sit on a plane and really be very clear about it. I picked things like pies and cakes – things based upon simple shapes like triangles and circles – and tried to orchestrate them. It was the cafeteria-type foods, of course, the cakes, pies, ice creams, hamburgers, hotdogs, canapés, club sandwiches, and other staples of the American diet – all of which have a stereotypical this-can-be-found-any-where-in-the-country-but-only-in- this-country quality – that brought me most of my early fame.‘ What he is saying in this is that he was inspired by simple a shape which is why his drawings are mostly of food. He would draw objects with easy shapes such as pies and cakes and then advance to trickier objects. In my opinion, Wayne Thiebaud is a great artist; the realism in some of his pieces is unreal. Yes, it is true that most of the objects that he depicted formed quite simple shapes, but sometimes things look easier to do than they actually are, and I think that is the case here. He has practised a lot on these compositions, and it shows, as he puts in some details and techniques which would be alien to the ordinary person. Long may he continue to create these works into his nineties and I just hope that, by persevering in class, I can gain a fraction of the skill he has when making

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