NGA Classroom: Counting on Art: Bios / Resources: Ten Things About Thiebaud (born 1920)

Bios / Resources: Ten Things About Thiebaud (born 1920)

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		Wayne Thiebaud was born in 1912 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.
Wayne Thiebaud, ca. 1985-86

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.
		Wayne Thiebaud drawing Aleck cartoons, 1943

Thiebaud explained:



		"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.

Wayne Thiebaud, Eight Lipsticks, 1988

Wayne Thiebaud, Steep Street, 1989

Wayne Thiebaud, Three Cows, 1991

Wayne Thiebaud, Man Sitting - Back View, 1964
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.