“For me it is about remembrance – sketching certain types of reflected patterns, different kinds of lighting, then conjuring it up with your memory and imagination.”
—Wayne ThiebaudThe Sacramento River deltas and levees near Thiebaud’s studio became a source of inspiration starting in the mid-1990s where he would sketch en plein air and then work combined ideas back at his easel – personal emotions along with academic composition and elements in daring colors. “I was intrigued by what I could do to try to get some kind of image or self-relationship, which I hadn’t seen so much…” Thiebaud said, “As a consequence, I tried to steal every kind of idea—Western, Eastern—and the use of everything I could think of—atmospheric perspective, size differences, color differences, overlapping, exaggeration, linear perspective, planal and sequential recessions—and to do that with the kind of vision I talked about before, with as many ways of seeing in the same picture—clear forms, hazy, squinting, glancing, staring and even a sort of inner seeing.”