My 20 Links p. 11, Wayne Thiebaud

Wayne Thiebaud

My response is from a photo I took in a stairwell across from the Fine Arts building at UF

Down 18th, Etching in Blue, 1979, Wayne Thiebaud

San Francisco Study, ca 1990

Tie Rack, Cosmetic Display, Women Playing Ball, 1990

Souvenirs ca 1990

Wayne Thiebaud was born in 1920 in Mesa, Arizona. He moved with his family to Long Beach, California, at age nine.

Thiebaud grew up during the Great Depression. He was a boy scout and worked in restaurants.

In high school he played basketball. He took art classes and started drawing cartoons. He also worked on stage sets for theater productions. Perhaps this experience with stage lighting gave him the idea to put bright light in his paintings.

As a teenager Thiebaud held several jobs, making posters for a movie theater and painting signs. One summer Thiebaud worked in the animation department at the Walt Disney Studios. He drew the "in-between frames" (drawings positioned between key changes in movement in order to make animation play smooth) for such cartoons as Goofy and Pinocchio.

In the 1940s, Thiebaud went to junior college and then served in the Army as an artist and cartoonist. He married and settled in Los Angeles and worked as a commercial artist and illustrator. At age twenty-nine he went back to college and received degrees in art, art history, and education. He began teaching art to college students and decided to become a serious painter himself.

In 1961, Thiebaud's food paintings—images of cakes, pies, candy, gumball machines, and deli counters painted with thick paint in bright colors—were exhibited in New York. They were a big hit! Though some scholars called Thiebaud a Pop artist because he painted popular consumer goods, he said he painted them out of nostalgia; they reminded him of his boyhood and the best of America. 


"My subject matter was a genuine sort of experience that came out of my life, particularly the American world in which I was privileged to be . . . . I would really think of the bakery counters, of the way the counter was lit, where the pies were placed, but I wanted just a piece of the experience. From when I worked in restaurants . . . [it was] always poetic to me."


Thiebaud painted things other than food. He made still lifes of neckties, eyeglasses, lipsticks, even cows and dogs. He also painted large portraits of human figures, applying thick paint in bright colors against stark white backgrounds.


Thiebaud went on to paint cityscapes—from the steep hills of San Francisco to the colorful landscapes of the Sacramento Valley in California.

Wayne Thiebaud retired from full-time teaching in 1990. He lives in Northern California and continues to paint.

National Art Gallery Classroom