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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.

Wayne Thiebaud

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Wayne Thiebaud
Age: 104
Born: 1920
Born: November 15
Artist
Cartoonist
Illustrator
Muralist
Painter
Printmaker
Sculptor
University Teacher
Mesa
Arizona
Morton Wayne Thiebaud
Wayne Morton Thiebaud
High
Apart
Animation
Rather
Speed
Squares
Littles
Paint
Sunlight
Little
Car
Canvas
Real
Air
Cars
Think
Activity
Fresh
Smear
Thinking
Painting
Absurd
Motor
World
Television
Glorious
Square

More quotes by Wayne Thiebaud

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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.
Wayne Thiebaud
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Morandi suggests we are all single in this world, hoping for independent repose. But our best opportunity for a community of excellence depends upon a collection of enlightened individuals.
Wayne Thiebaud
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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.
Wayne Thiebaud
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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.
Wayne Thiebaud
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Common objects become strangely uncommon when removed from their context and ordinary ways of being seen.
Wayne Thiebaud
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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.
Wayne Thiebaud
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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.
Wayne Thiebaud
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Diebenkorn was a very good critic, a very tough critic, tough on himself, tough on others. He expected the finest.
Wayne Thiebaud
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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.
Wayne Thiebaud
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Art is not delivered like the morning paper it has to be stolen from Mount Olympus.
Wayne Thiebaud
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Art is one of the dirtiest words in our language it's mucked up with all kinds of meanings. There's the art of plumbing there's the art of almost anything that you can say.
Wayne Thiebaud
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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.
Wayne Thiebaud
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If we don't have a sense of humor, we lack a sense of perspective
Wayne Thiebaud
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Painting is more important than art.
Wayne Thiebaud
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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.
Wayne Thiebaud
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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.
Wayne Thiebaud
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As far as I'm concerned, there is only one study and that is the way in which things relate to one another.
Wayne Thiebaud
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A conscious decision to eliminate certain details and include selective bits of personal experiences or perceptual nuances, gives the painting more of a multi-dimension than when it is done directly as a visual recording. This results in a kind of abstraction... and thus avoids the pitfalls of mere decoration.
Wayne Thiebaud
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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.
Wayne Thiebaud
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The Gold Rush and the Pony Express made Sacramento a substantial place in terms of enterprise.
Wayne Thiebaud