Rebecca Solnit
30 December 2021
And now, since I serve you a balanced diet, some of the exquisite and witty landscapes by Wayne Thiebaud, who died a few days ago at the age of 101. I had not seen a lot of these–somehow everyone kept reproducing Thiebaud’s cake paintings, which are justly famous and linked thick paint and cake frosting in a very California joke at the expense of deadly-serious manly painters.
But his tilted and flattened perspective, thick paint, and delicious color sense were also used in all these paintings of the flat deltascapes east of the Bay Area (he taught at UC Davis) and the steep coastal and mountainscapes of California as well. They delight me because they’re extremely recognizable renditions of familiar places that are seldom represented in art and because the way they’re represented is so distinctive.
Many thanks to Robin Coste Lewis for bringing these landscapes to my attention.