Wayne Thiebaud

Wayne Thiebaud (Mesa, Arizona, 1920 – Sacramento, California, 2021) was an American painter known for brightly colored pictures of everyday objects such as pies, cakes, lipsticks, paint cans and ice cream cones, painted with heavy pigment. He is associated with Pop Art because of his interest in mass-produced objects, although his early works slightly predate those of the classic Pop artists. For that reason he is regarded as one of the most beloved and recognizable American painters of the mid-twentieth century.

He grew up in southern California. As a young man he worked as a cartoonist and designer from 1938 to 1949, and one summer he apprenticed at Walt Disney Studios drawing in-betweens. During the Second World War he served as an artist in the First Motion Picture Unit of the United States Army Air Forces. He studied at Sacramento State College, earning a bachelor's degree in 1951 and a master's degree in 1952.

During a stay in New York in 1956 and 1957, he became friends with Elaine and Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. Back in California, he began a series of very small paintings of food displayed in shop windows, focusing on the basic shapes of pastries and sweets. In 1962 a show at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York brought him national recognition, although he described himself simply as a painter of illusionistic form.

He later also worked on landscapes, city views and figures. His landscapes, influenced by Richard Diebenkorn, have been compared to those of Edward Hopper. From 1964 he made prints at Crown Point Press. He taught for forty-two years at the University of California, Davis, where he influenced many art and design students.

His work is held in collections such as the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 1993 he designed Coastline, the image used on a California specialty license plate, which has become one of the most recognizable public artworks in the state.