Lot Essay
A superb example of Wayne Thiebaud's most contemplative works, Drink highlights the abstracted beauty of the commonplace, creating mystery and a subtle narrative through the artist's delicate touch and heightened sense of light and color.
The California landscape and its unique light has been inspiring artists for many years but few artists have been able to communicate the special nature of this ephemeral experience as finely as Thiebaud. The artist's particular brand of realism has outpaced the work of many other West Coast artists who have yet to fully saturate their paintings as effectively with light and color.
In Drink, Thiebaud's clever use of halation, the retracing of edges with thin shifts in color, serves to illuminate the contrast between the defined cylindrical shape of the shot glass and the fluidity of its contents causing it to breathe and take on a life of its own.
"The more you look at it, the more the edges, the inside and the minute particles quiver. It is almost as if it is loaded and you recognize a kind of stillness which tends to vibrate" (Wayne Thiebaud as quoted in, J. Coplans, Wayne Thiebaud, exh. cat, Pasadena Art Museum, 1968, p. 36).
The California landscape and its unique light has been inspiring artists for many years but few artists have been able to communicate the special nature of this ephemeral experience as finely as Thiebaud. The artist's particular brand of realism has outpaced the work of many other West Coast artists who have yet to fully saturate their paintings as effectively with light and color.
In Drink, Thiebaud's clever use of halation, the retracing of edges with thin shifts in color, serves to illuminate the contrast between the defined cylindrical shape of the shot glass and the fluidity of its contents causing it to breathe and take on a life of its own.
"The more you look at it, the more the edges, the inside and the minute particles quiver. It is almost as if it is loaded and you recognize a kind of stillness which tends to vibrate" (Wayne Thiebaud as quoted in, J. Coplans, Wayne Thiebaud, exh. cat, Pasadena Art Museum, 1968, p. 36).