Wayne Thiebaud Quotations

Diebenkorn was a very good critic, a very tough critic, tough on himself, tough on others. He expected the finest.

Morandi suggests we are all single in this world, hoping for independent repose. But our best opportunity for a community of excellence depends upon a collection of enlightened individuals.

A painter is always overjoyed when anybody pays any attention to him at all, puts him in any category, calls him anything - as long as they call him something.

I don't make a lot of distinctions between things like landscape or figure painting, because to me the problems are inherently the same - lighting, color, structure, and so on - certainly traditional and ordinary problems.

The figures... are not supposed to reveal anything... It's like seeing a stranger in some place like an air terminal for the first time. You look at him, you notice his shoes, his suit, the pin in his lapel, but you don't have any particular feeling about him.

The Gold Rush and the Pony Express made Sacramento a substantial place in terms of enterprise.

I'm a believer in the notion that artists who do good work believe in the ideas of extremes.

If I don't have anything better to do that day, I'll copy paintings, generally by people who have some relationship to the work of the moment.

As far as I'm concerned, there is only one study and that is the way in which things relate to one another.

The most important thing is that the work has to be solid [in terms of its formal structure] and that the work accomplishes what it strives to achieve. It has to be genuine - not mannered or stylistically driven.