Good-bye, Wayne — One Red Chair Studio

““The oil paint is made to look like meringue,” said Marla Prather, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art New York who helped organize a 2001 retrospective of the artist’s work. “And with the cakes, you get this great sense of texture with the frosting. You just want to step close and lick it.””

Perhaps you saw the news article yesterday. I’m always a little sad to see an artist I love leave us.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/26/obituaries/wayne-thiebaud-dead.html?searchResultPosition=1

https://www.npr.org/2021/12/26/1068131242/artist-wayne-thiebaud-dies-at-age-101

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/wayne-thiebaud-playful-painter-of-the-everyday-dies-at-101/

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/the-artist-wayne-thiebaud-obituary-2055030

(Maybe ONE of these will work for you. Almost everything these days requires a subscription to read.)

Wayne Thiebaud was one of the artists featured in my 2020 calendar, Whose House? He was the November artist. I found that month’s piece to be the most challenging of all. I was creating houses, several of them “in a row,” trying to make them look like cakes.

When I was teaching, my partner Elizabeth and I got the kids together, told them about Thiebaud and they all “painted cakes, with a slice missing.” Individually, pretty meh, but when all of them were put together, dynamite! I think that was part of his secret, too.

As part of a thank you project for calendar purchasers that year, I ran a series that highlighted each month’s artist with downloadable stickers, cards, artwork and recipes, and featured some videos and other work as the month came along. Gosh, I had so much fun doing that and learned so much. (You can see some of the videos from that year in the right column on the blog.)

Here was the blog post for Wayne Thiebaud in November 2020.. (The image below is just a snapshot of the page; you will need to actually go to the link here. )