Wayne Thiebaud Quotes
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I don't make a lot of distinctions between things like landscape or figure painting, because to me the problems are inherently the same - lighting, color, structure, and so on - certainly traditional and ordinary problems.
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My sin as a painter is that I just want to paint anything I want to paint - and repaint.
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The Gold Rush and the Pony Express made Sacramento a substantial place in terms of enterprise.
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Diebenkorn was a very good critic, a very tough critic, tough on himself, tough on others. He expected the finest.
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We all need critical confrontation of the fullest and most extreme kind that we can get. You can unnecessarily limit yourself by choosing your criticism.
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I haven't the slightest idea what art is, but to be a painter is something of which you have to prove.
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The figures... are not supposed to reveal anything... It's like seeing a stranger in some place like an air terminal for the first time. You look at him, you notice his shoes, his suit, the pin in his lapel, but you don't have any particular feeling about him.
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If we don't have a sense of humor, we lack a sense of perspective
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Morandi gave an intimate view of his deepest thoughts. We watched him inquiring after the devilish questions of essences and substances.
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Discipline is not a restriction but an aid to freedom.
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Commonplace objects are constantly changing… The pies, for example, we now see, are not going to be around forever. We are merely used to the idea that things do not change.
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An artist needs the best studio instruction, the most rigorous demands, and the toughest criticism in order to tune up his sensibilities.
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If you stare at an object, as you do when you paint, there is no point at which you stop learning things from it.
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Common objects become strangely uncommon when removed from their context and ordinary ways of being seen.
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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.
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I'm not just interested in the pictorial aspects of the landscape - see a pretty place and try to paint it - but in some way to manage it, manipulate it, or see what I can turn it into.
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An artist has to train his responses more than other people do. He has to be as disciplined as a mathematician. Discipline is not a restriction but an aid to freedom. It prepares an artist to choose his own limitations.
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A painter is always overjoyed when anybody pays any attention to him at all, puts him in any category, calls him anything - as long as they call him something.
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I'm a believer in the notion that artists who do good work believe in the ideas of extremes.
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Every paint-stroke takes you farther and farther away from your initial concept. And you have to be thankful for that.
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The most important thing is that the work has to be solid [in terms of its formal structure] and that the work accomplishes what it strives to achieve. It has to be genuine - not mannered or stylistically driven.
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If I don't have anything better to do that day, I'll copy paintings, generally by people who have some relationship to the work of the moment.
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When you think of painting as painting it is rather absurd. The real world is before us - glorious sunlight and activity and fresh air, and high speed motor cars and television, all the animation - a world apart from a little square of canvas that you smear paint on.
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Art is not delivered like the morning paper; it has to be stolen from Mount Olympus.