Wayne Thiebaud (b. 1920)

"Sacramento is certainly the headquarters and where I've done most of [my] work... I've painted a lot in the valley, on the river... I've painted a lot of the ridges around Coloma and Napa and places here, a lot of little areas... where these sort of little bumps of earth grow up and people build little private worlds on top of them, things of that kind. I'm working on... the river and the way in which agricultural patterns relate to the river. A lot of that does have to do with aerial perspective... The big trick is to try to avoid... the pictorial aspect of the river. It's such a seductive enterprise, to paint a river, the reflections, the prettiness of it, and so on"
(Wayne Thiebaud as quoted in S. McGough, Thiebaud Selects Thiebaud A Forty-Year Survey from Private Collections, exh. cat, Sacramento, 1996, p. 12).