Wayne Thiebaud

Wayne Thiebaud 

          Two Thursdays ago, Wayne Thiebaud was at UCDavis doing an interview with Kenneth Baker. I was curious to see someone like Thiebaud, who I learned about in my Design 1 class, and hear them talk about their experiences. It was slightly surreal to actually have the opportunity to see someone who I learned about in a class. I was able to take notes in my tiny outdated cellphone. The conversation between Thiebaud and Baker helped me understand and differentiate the fine line between art and design a little better.
          Thiebaud often joked around around about how he felt that his choice in becoming a painter was a "vocational disaster" and "worst career move people can make" despite his successes. From his experiences, I start to see that Thiebaud gets a lot of his inspiration and creativity from within and inspiration from reality and its scale because he considers himself a realist. He showed us a painting with a canoe on a river where he pointed out that the scale of the nails and the oar on the canoe were all properly modeled and carefully calculated, and he also pointed out the areas of sharper focus which brings together various perceptional realities as one in the painting. It was really insightful to view a painting through the eyes of a real artist.
          I had to leave the lecture/talk early, but from what I was able to stay for, Thiebaud talking more about techniques in paintings than about the their objectives affect on society. I see that design is more towards a social purpose than a means of expression like in art, but they both always overlap each other in some way and meet in experience.

"Cakes" by Wayne Thiebaud (1963)

Credit / Links:
[Picture of Wayne Thiebaud] http://www.csus.edu/news/100507donors.stm
[Cakes] google images