Wayne Thiebaud (b. 1920)

“He has continued to exercise this love for miniaturization—perhaps picked up from Morandi or Klee?—throughout his career, and these small pictures often have distinct moods about them. They are intimate almost by definition but can be very plain, or ravishingly self-confident, dark and brooding, sentimental, or really funny. There is a plainspoken honesty about such pictures and the courage or lack of guile to make something that may not fit any of the expected categories of art rhetoric.”

Steven Nash, ‘Thiebaud’s Many Realisms’ in Wayne Thiebaud 70 Years of Painting, Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, 2009, p. 16.