Wayne Thiebaud (b. 1920)

Freeway Exit, painted in 1986, is an exquisite example of Wayne Thiebaud’s mastery of his art, medium, and his use of composition and color. The soft, muted blue of the painting’s ground superbly frames the rounded forms of the highways and freeway exits of San Francisco. Thiebaud's combination of foreshortened perspective and dramatic shadows cast by the expressway as it snakes its way through the lower half of the painting creates a compositional labyrinth that reverberates with strong visual, nearly abstract, forms. The resulting scene is one that causes us to reconsider the familiar, to open our eyes to the visual possibilities contained within even the most mundane observable landscape.
Thiebaud stated of his beloved San Francisco cityscapes, "I was playing around with abstract notions of the edge—I was fascinated, living in San Francisco, by the way that different streets came in and then just vanished. So I sat out on a street corner and began to paint them, but they didn't really work. No one view seemed to get this sense of edges appearing, things swooping around their own edges, that I loved" (W. Thiebaud quoted in A. Gopnik, "American Painter", Wayne Thiebaud, New York, exh. cat., 2000, p. 58).