For painting pies and cakes, Wayne Thiebaud created a new era for pop art in the 1960s. I have seen some of his works before; at a friend’s house or at a local café. But I never really appreciated his work until I saw it up close and in person at the new Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. I read that Thiebaud was raised in California and even dabbed a bit of his teaching career here at UC Davis. This made me more inclined to pay attention to his work and interact with it as an audience.
A lot of people would probably question his subject matter. Cakes? Pies? Lipstick? The objects of his paintings show the food culture of that time in a simplistic manner. The easy shapes of triangles and circles point viewers to the painting as a whole, the gestalt, of composition. For me, when I see that Thiebaud doesn’t fill up his pictures with painted stuff, the background becomes it’s own shape and lets me imagine my own scene of desserts.
When I stepped closer to look at the paintings, I noticed that with almost every piece that had a single color in the background with objects in the foreground, Thiebaud used his brush and outlined the figured with the background color. This technique struck me because I’m used to seeing paintings where the background was created first, then the foreground, that way the foreground overlaps the background. However, Thiebaud exaggerates this change by making the background strokes very straight and horizontal, then outlining cakes or human figures with the same paint.
Analyzing Thiebaud’s art at Crocker, I realized that artists make many intentional marks in their pieces that might not be known at first sight. Whether it’s simplifying the composition or minute details of brush strokes, it all is for a purpose and it is all a design that the artist chooses.
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