Monday, March 11, 2019

A wonderful interview with Wayne Thiebaud in the Brooklyn Rail



There are so many good quotes in this interview, but I have to share this one about value. I've been saying this to my students for years:



Thiebaud: That kind of painting, I think, is what led me to something like Fauvism in my landscapes. Fauvism represented something very crucial to me in terms of how it was possible to do paintings like that with color—particularly Derain's great Collioure paintings. And what the Fauves do when they're successful is they get the value right. If you get the value right, the darkness or the lightness, you can then use almost any color, hue, or intensity, to fit into that value structure. And that's, I think, a really great human invention. I don't think machines can do that . . . yet. [Laughs]