Wayne Thiebaud (1920–2021)
1964
Ink and graphite
Works on paper
Wayne Thiebaud believed drawing was a vital skill that could teach its students to ‘see a lot better and a lot deeper’. He drew daily from his teenage years and initially worked as an illustrator and cartoonist, including a stint at Walt Disney Studios. This selection of works on paper shows how Thiebaud’s approach to still-life painting was rooted in his drawing practice. He did not typically use drawings as preliminary studies for paintings but liked to explore similar compositions in different media. An important influence was his commercial art training, where art directors would debate which version of a design had ‘the best graphic power’, as he put it. He aimed to distil the essence of an object, be it the heft and structure of sliced cakes, dramatically illuminated in black ink, or the brittle glassiness of synthetically coloured candy sticks rendered in watercolour.