Wayne Thiebaud on Morandi, light, color, shadows

This is a new section called “The ViewFinder” that I will frequently update with new opinion pieces, rants, videos, great links, pretty much anything on a wide range of topics of interest. I plan to use this section so that I can post other material besides the main top article and not bump it off the top page.

To start off this section I’m including a link to an article posted 11/08/11 on the Art News’s Object Lessons,
Wayne Thiebaud on Morandi, light, color, shadows, and more. An interview by Alessia Masi with Wayne Thiebaud that was included with catalog for the the Museo Morandi’s recent show of Wayne Thiebaud’s paintings.

a couple of choice Wayne Thiebaud quotes from the interview…

AM: Your careful study of light on the form plays a strong role in your paintings. Like in Morandi’s work, the light seems to come from inside your paintings themselves, while they take shape, a sort of luminous energy. Could you comment on the role of light in your paintings?

WT: Well I think we’re talking about a very interesting duality about light and the use of light in painting. One category has to do with the formal properties of light and imitating it, that is to say, of knowing what a highlight is, a cast shadow, a reflected light and so on, and then replicating that or using that strategically as a way of determining volume. So in a sense you’re showing how light works by specific annotation. The other kind of light however is quite a different tradition, that’s where, as you indicated with your reference to Morandi, the light is created by way of creating energy, by the juxtaposition of colors and the interaction of those colors to create light quite different from the modulation of volumetric rendering. If we look at Bonnard, or Matisse, or Vuillard, that tradition, the wonder of it is the way the light comes off the paper by way of color. It’s not what we refer to as natural light, but it’s a kind of eternal light, or symbolic light, or light that is sustained by the energy of the interaction of color.

AM: We know that Morandi had an almost ritualistic way of finding the right composition for his paintings. He would place various objects on the tables in his study and work with each of them until he was satisfied with their positions. He would then mark the paper beneath the objects with a pencil. He would do the same for his own feet on the floor so that he would be able to find that “unique point of view” again. Can you relate to this meticulous search for the right composition in your own work?

WT: I can, because I’ve read so many instances of painters, all the way from Morandi through many others who are fascinated by it. The most ridiculous one, I think, was Ingres, who loved to tie threads on all those draperies and pin them in such a way that the point of tension every time that he restructured his subject was back to exactly the same marks. So the idea of structural development, Morandi does it that way. Mondrian made thousands of little thumbnail drawings. Sometimes he could make as many as a hundred little three inch by two inch or four inch by five inch drawings of placements for a particular piece. Where the lines would intersect, how much space in one area as opposed to another. This was one of the things I got out of the old art directors who always had you make lots of tiny little compositions before you made a large one. I’ve been taught that in my teaching experience as well, to try to have students get so they’re always trying for one more variation of what they’re looking at rather than getting too early cast in concrete, getting a composition that doesn’t work—it’s too heavy on the right or it’s not coherent—or whatever. This testing out different set ups is one of very basic needs of any serious artist. Watching de Kooning work as I had a privilege to do or working with Diebenkorn and seeing how long he would look and slightly move things or re-draw. I think, the whole idea of collage was developed because you’re blotting out an area you don’t want which re-establishes the plain and then being able to go back and make adjustments. So yes, I think that certainly attention to composition is a mark of anyone who’s serious about it. It’s probably a pretty neurotic activity, but that’s what it is.