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WAYNE THIEBAUD LANDSCAPES NOVENBER 11 – DECEMBER 20, 1997 CAMPBELL-THIEBAUD GALLERY, SF CALIF Famous for his dreamy 1960s paintings of cakes, Wayne Thiebaud began his career as a commercial artist and cartoon illustrator like many other artists of the period, including Andy Warhol. And like Warhol, Thiebaud became tied to pop art since he was making images of popular American products like food, lipsticks, and toys. Yet unlike many of his pop peers, SF Bay Area-based Thiebaud wasn't interested in poking fun at the establishment. He's a painter's painter, a real traditionalist. Wayne Thiebaud: LANDSCAPES covers a lot of area in cityscapes and landscapes. His cake paintings are formally beautiful in their color, shadow, and composition. They are perfect specimens of the good life in America, the paint lovingly applied in places like thick frosting. His cityscapes of San Francisco fiercely exaggerate the hilly landscape, capturing a perspective from the ground and air simultaneously while utilizing the light that the Bay Area is famous for. Wayne Thiebaud has devoted much attention to landscape since his move to San Francisco in 1972, and this exhibition contained a generous images. For those most comfortable with his still lifes and intimidated by the objectification he extends to portraiture, Thiebaud's landscapes and cityscapes challenge and invite. An increasing emphasis on geometric form at times eclipses the subject altogether with the thrust of extreme diagonals and a giddy, vertiginous presentation of space. As in Chinese landscape painting, there is little attention to the conventions of perspective, although the smaller landscapes have a plein-air atmosphere to them. Since 1993, Thiebaud has been painting panoramic views of the delta of the Sacramento River. Occupying the forty miles or so between Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay, the delta is terra incognita to most Californians, not because it is remote, but because it is inaccessible, traversed by irrigation canals and dirt tracks raised on embankments, rather than by roads. As we can see from Green River Lands, one of the most recent works in the series, and, through its delicious and flamboyant physicality, the grandest, Thiebaud has, in capturing the uniqueness of this isolated countryside, combined pictorial procedures worked out across his life with new forms of tension, from which these paintings gain a remarkable immediacy. Thiebaud has always been an experimental painter, while sedulously avoiding other, or pictorially unmotivated, forms of novelty. He has experimented with multiple viewpoints; with shifts in size and scale; with motifs that function at once configurationally and representationally, like striation; and with many effects of color. One of these effects, used with great virtuosity, is "halation," or the distribution around the contour of an object of small dots of highly saturated color, generally complementary to its local color. Originating in the practice of approximating to the object by drawing a succession of contours, each in a somewhat darker hue, but letting its predecessor show through, the halo effect induces a sense of levitation. In Thiebaud's earlier still lifts, halation lent to miscellaneous "things," to the flotsam and jetsam of middle-American life, a feeling of simple exhilaration. But in these later landscapes the problem is different. For Thiebaud, what is distinctive about the delta lies in a contrast between the great oozing majesty of the river, with its variety of channels, and the adjacent harlequinade of water meadow, plow, orchard, pasture, fines of poplars, and fields put to some unidentifiable agro-industrial use. To convey this contrast, Thiebaud evolves a perceptual counterpart of great subtlety. First, he adopts a high viewpoint, or rather a series of high viewpoints, which effectively cuts off the horizon. Then, benefiting from this closure, he drags our eye down the pictorial surface to the bottom edge of the picture. In Green River Lands, when he gets us there, he goes further. Simulating a ride on a ghost train, he pitches us over the edge, and seemingly down, though pictorially it is up, onto the line of phosphorescent trees, which are waiting for us like a safety net. Finally, there begins, for the eye, the long trudge back up the picture, against the downward flow of the water, through the patchwork of fields, each patch lying in some provocative disharmony with its neighbor. The disharmony makes each transition difficult for the eye to effect: The provocation makes it imperative. Soft cove exhibition cateloge: 8 in X 10 in., 50 pages, 25 full color images Essay; Wayne Theibaud's rural landscapes, by Victor Dalkey Binding good, like new, no marks, no tears. Payment: Paypal only. CHECK OUT OUR OTHER ART BOOKS !!!!!!!! Payment should be made within three days. Shipment will be made when payment is received. Please ask any questions before you bid.
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