ART REVIEW : Thiebaud: Changer of the Mundane Into the Surreal

IRVINE —  You’re moving your tray down the cafeteria line, reaching for the rolls, the salad, the hot dish. You swore you weren’t going to eat dessert, but the stuff looks so luscious. That wobbly drift of delicately browned meringue over that slab of chocolate pie. . . . Well, damn the calories.

Anybody with a sweet tooth knows that siren call. We carry pictures in our minds of these treats, and we expect that whatever we see in the restaurant will match our mental images. How could a slice of pie fail to be triangular? How could meringue not be white and slightly browned on top?

When Northern California artist Wayne Thiebaud began painting pictures of restaurant desserts in the 1960s, he was struck by the way the food looked under the harsh, unnatural glare of fluorescent lights. He was intrigued by the traditional ways desserts are decorated to tempt the diner. And he liked to think about the differences between their real appearance and the way we picture them in our minds.

Thiebaud’s subjects also include other inanimate objects, as well as the San Francisco cityscape, landscapes and the human figure. All these bases are covered by a dandy show of more than 80 of his paintings on paper, drawings and prints from the past four decades, at the Fine Arts Gallery at UC Irvine through Nov. 4. The exhibit was organized by Nelson Gallery at UC Davis, where the 69-year-old artist has taught since 1960.

That was the year when he hit upon his signature approach to objects--an effect he once described as “somewhat like the feeling in an air-conditioned, well-lighted, quiet place where the slightest tremor can be sensed.”

Orderly rows of food on plates turn out to be studded with tiny discrepancies--variations in the sizes of the cake wedges or the way the cherry garnishes are plunked on top. Even when Thiebaud zeroes in on a single dish, like a serving of pudding--you find yourself noticing the slight ooze of cherry juice that disturbs the pillowy whiteness of whipped cream.

By isolating his stylized subjects against brightly lit, white backgrounds, Thiebaud could recreate them as clearly recognizable yet oddly surreal products of the mind’s eye. Objects frequently have rims of bright yellow, red or green, mimicking the optical phenomenon known as “halation”--the rainbowlike halo effect that occurs under bright lighting.

More recently, Thiebaud has used dark backgrounds as a backdrop in such works as “Dark Candy Apples,” a watercolor (it also exists in an oil version). With nothing else to distract the eye, the viewer is struck by the glossy tactility of the deep-red glazed apples and by the rhythm of the different angles of the wood sticks.

Other still-life subjects of his include glistening fish, a hunk of red-brown rib chops, a smoking cigar, a daffodil in a drinking glass, rows of wire-rimmed eyeglasses and a pair of polished shoes.

The familiar subject matter and seductive style of Thiebaud’s work make it so immediately lovable that it’s easy to ignore or misunderstand its virtues as serious contemporary art. During the ‘60s, Thiebaud’s food imagery was assumed to be part of the Pop Art movement, which cast a variably neutral or jaundiced eye on consumer products and mass media.

In common with a number of pop artists such as Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist, Thiebaud worked in the commercial-art world before he came to concentrate on fine art. His clarity and economy of line may well owe something to the discipline he learned during his days as an illustrator, cartoonist and Rexall Drug Co. layout design man. (His interest in lighting, on the other hand, may date all the way back to his stage-crew work for his high school’s theatrical productions.)

But unlike the pop artists, Thiebaud didn’t choose to stress the consumer-oriented aspect of this food. Instead, he followed in the footsteps of generations of artists who had a particular fascination with small, familiar objects.

Having worked in restaurants as a youth, Thiebaud remembered (as he once told an interviewer) how rows of pies or “a tin of pie with a piece cut out of it and one piece sitting beside it . . . were always poetic to me.”

He zeroed in on the formal qualities of this humble food in a particularly contemporary way, with an ultra-cool, detached approach that stressed minute variations within multiple images of the same object and simple geometric forms.

Thiebaud’s landscape and city images are the product of the same values. Although the country scenes are rooted in the Sacramento Valley countryside Thiebaud knew well, their rhythms, shapes and colors exist only in the artist’s mind.

In a pastel drawing, “Cow Ridge (Three Cows),” three cows separated by equal distances make their way down a hill that is as severely slanted as the side of a triangle. The sky is green, the hill is blue, and the shadow patterns of the animals create a simple three-note harmony. The cows look alike--except for the different shapes of their tails.

In 1973, after establishing a second home in San Francisco, Thiebaud began translating the dizzying grades of San Francisco streets into puzzle-like stacks of colored shapes. Sometimes combining several perspectives in one view, he created wonderfully dense and rhythmic patterns that combine specific building details with vertical ribbons of road. Other works dwell on the shape of freeway curves, punctuated by slender light poles that droop like delicate plants.

When his subject was the human figure, the artist must have found it particularly hard to strip away all the extraneous detail, to treat flesh and blood with the neutral, bright-light scrutiny of a piece of pie. Thiebaud has painted suave, immaculately stripped-down canvases of people--including his own wife. But the figure drawings on view show him simply as a good draftsman, not the alchemist who can turn the stuff of daily life into simple, startling objects that compel attention.

Works in the exhibit from the late ‘40s and ‘50s reveal the eclectic activity of Thiebaud’s early days, when he was restlessly pursuing artistic leads from a range of different sources. This sampling includes a careful, Cubist-derived landscape (“Rocks and Sea”), an academic portrait (“Woman with Fan”) and a landscape with skittering, Expressionistic dashes of ink flying over the white paper (“Figures in the Snow/New York City”).

Other artistic influences he has acknowledged include the ornate, presentational style of Byzantine art, the creamy brushwork of the 19th-Century Italian Macchiaioli painters and the figurative painting of his Bay Area colleagues, particularly Richard Diebenkorn.

Eventually, he figured out how to combine aspects he admired in these works with his own distinctive take on the world around him. Watching this process unfold in the first batch of drawings and watercolors--watching him single out the slant of a hill or the tilted display box in a grocer’s window--is one of the quiet joys of this exhibition.

As a longtime teacher, used to having to explain himself, Thiebaud has made many pithy observations about his work. Drawing, he once said, is a way “to test what one can know about the look of such things as grace, sensuality, affectation, tension, repose, ineffableness, and those many mysterious characteristics which remain between a question and an answer.”

“Wayne Thiebaud: Works on Paper 1947-1987” remains through Nov. 4 at the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery, in the university’s Fine Arts Village off Bridge Road. Hours are noon to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is free. Information: (714) 856-6610.