Wayne Thiebaud (b. 1920)

In his depictions of San Francisco, Wayne Thiebaud challenges the traditional genre of landscape painting with his unique combination of bold perspective and brushstrokes and pop colors heavily applied in broad sections of light and shadow. Thiebaud turned his attention to the San Francisco streets and shoreline after settling in the city in the early 1970s, focusing on city streets, lush landscapes, as well as the rugged coastline. In this canvas, he draws from the striking topography of streets dramatically curving and plunging toward the shoreline at precipitous angles. The street at the center of the work, dotted by cars and halved by a clearly drawn yellow line, rises vertically and just as sharply as the gray edifice clinging to the cliff at the top right, upending traditionally drawn perspective and adding an electric energy to the work. The entire canvas is a series of geometric planes, boxes of vibrant color and contrast that constantly shift the perspective in an active roller coaster adventure. Without a hint of sky or a clear horizon line, this is Thiebaud's quintessential style, as he hovers between abstraction and representation, all the while playing with light and shadow. The ocean, swelling in shades of azure capped with white, contrasts strongly with the deeply shadowed hills that plunge at breathtaking angles, hold homes and buildings in a deep valley, and offer the viewer multiple perspectives and frames of reference. With no fixed vantage point, San Francisco Shore provides an aerial view of the winding coast and is defined by ambiguity and vertical tension, tiny trees dotting the landscape and offering vertical contrast to the low horizontal buildings that fiercely crowd the center of the scene clinging precariously to the steep slopes. Roads seemingly vanish into buildings or the ocean, cars and buses appear to cling to the roadway, and deep shadows embrace buildings on steep hills, all exuding a sense of the pull of gravity the scene conveys. Thiebaud captures the architectural extremes of the city in this one canvas, including a towering office building, verdant fields, and the freeway that borders the vast ocean. Though the fields and hills are painted in greens and browns, shadows on roads and buildings glow in unexpectedly brilliant hues of blue and violet.

Landscapes have remained central to Thiebaud's artistic development throughout much of his mature career and provide a persistent diaglogue between realism and abstraction that has characterized his work. The contrasting shadows and light in San Francisco Shore simultaneously create depth and flatness, a sense of both three-dimensional space and the tactile quality of the two-dimensional surface of the canvas that Thiebaud emphasizes with his heavily applied paint. This tension culminates in a dynamic canvas in Thiebaud's mature style that synthesizes all the formal and aesthetic complexity of the modern masters and creates an urban adventure that challenges the limits of the imagination by condensing perspective and powerfully manipulating the unique geography of the Bay Area for inspiration.