Brown River

"the delta of the Sacramento River. It is a landscape almost Tuscan in its human articulation of terraces and farmed fields-but it is wet rather than sunny, with rivers and irrigation ditches snaking through, and all seen from high aboveIn these new landscapes the view is entirely and unmistakably that of an eye in the sky-the view not so much of a satellite as of a small crop-dusting plane. The world it sees is fantastically rich, almost psychedelically coloredhe (Thiebaud) builds a kaleidoscopic variety of shapes: striped furrows and striated fans, hot pink parallelograms and S-curves, magenta trapezoids locked into high violet-green cypresseswhile the linear pattern of furrows and crop striations and ditches adds an incised, wild, nearly Op-art element to what had been before, essentially, a classical language."

Adam Gopnik, "An American Painter", in ex. cat. Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective, San Francisco, 2000, p. 62).