Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art is on view at the Legion of Honor through August 17, 2025. Experience 60 quintessential works by Thiebaud and dive into one of the most important and overlooked aspects of his creative practice: his passionate engagement with art history. Learn more

By Grace Munakata, painter, teacher, and Wayne Thiebaud’s former student and friend

I first met Wayne Thiebaud as his student at the University of California, Davis. Wayne Thiebaud was a remarkable teacher because he was so darned enthusiastic about the art that he loved. His joy from looking at art, questioning, and absorbing it was crucial to his art practice and teaching. He wanted to keep the tradition of looking from life and looking at art alive, and his class assignments often aligned with this approach.

Creating inventive landscapes

Wayne Thiebaud, "Window Views," 1989–1993. Oil on canvas. 72 x 64 in. (182.9 x 162.6 cm). Private Collection. © 2025 Wayne Thiebaud Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photograph by Randy Dodson

The psychology of seeing and the role of memory fascinated Wayne. One of his assignments was to bring a shoebox (without the top), set it on its side, and arrange objects inside. A small mirror could be a reflective lake, blocks might be buildings, and rocks could be mountains. You looked, improvised, and mixed memory with pure invention — something he did in his own work.

Copying work

Honoré Daumier (French, 1808–1879), "Advice to a Young Artist," 1865–1868. Oil on canvas, 16 1⁄4 × 13 in. (41.3 × 33 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Gift of Duncan Phillips, 1941.6.1

A reinterpretation of Honoré Daumier’s work with vibrant colors, showing an older artist advising a young apprentice

Wayne Thiebaud, "Advice to a Young Artist" (after Honoré Daumier), not dated. Oil on canvas board, 16 × 12 in. (40.6 × 30.5 cm). Collection of the Wayne Thiebaud, Foundation. ©️ 2025 Wayne Thiebaud Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Wayne encouraged copying work of artists you admired. Rather than faithfully replicating a painting, he integrated what interested him — like having access to more words to express yourself, instead of quoting someone else’s sentence. An assignment (that I later borrowed in my own teaching) was to copy a masterwork. We matched colors, brush marks, and rhythms as closely as possible. Remaking it yourself is a visceral, firsthand way to understand a painting’s structure. We learned that color is mercurial and slippery — its shade and vibrancy depends entirely on adjacent hues.

Seeing colors within one color

Wayne Thiebaud, "Cakes & Pies," 1994–1995. Oil on canvas, 72 x 64 in. (182.9 x 162.6 cm). Collection of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri, Bebe and Crosby Kemper Collection, Gift of the Enid and Crosby Kemper Foundation, 1995.100.01. © 2025 Wayne Thiebaud Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photograph by E. G. Schempf, 2019

Wayne wanted his students to see the full range of color in what appeared to be one color. One project required us to use every color in our palettes in our paintings. With white objects on a white surface, the differences of light and dark came from the light source. Looking closely, we’d see hints of yellow, orange, pink, blue-violet, and lavender grays. The longer you looked, the stronger the colors became. It felt almost hallucinatory. Wayne used this phenomenon constantly in his work.

You’ll also see vivid colors outlining objects in his paintings. He said he accidentally discovered they made edges glow. When he demonstrated working from a still life, he’d sketch directly on the canvas with yellow paint, then adjust with red lines, and finish using blue. He’d apply more descriptive color, but bits of those bright colors remained.

Independent study impressions

Wayne Thiebaud watching a student paint a still life, 1969. University Archives Photographs Collection, Department of Special Collections, General Library, University of California, Davis

My fondest memories are from an independent study with two other students, one of them now my husband, Michael. Wayne invited us into his office. On the walls hung several paintings and a poster of a row of cakes. On a filing cabinet, he’d arranged shells, smooth and spiny. His desk was a jumble that included a yellow gumball dispenser. There were a few chairs, a frayed oriental rug, a coffee pot, a hot plate, and a jar of Skippy peanut butter. On another shelf, more books and a green Perrier bottle with a yellow daffodil. Trying to put us at ease, he’d make us coffee and offer cookies from a tin. He’d dress jauntily, wearing perhaps a blue-grey shirt with a brilliant red-orange tie.

Before looking at our work, we’d discuss three very different artworks, describing what we saw and what we thought each work communicated. He believed a successful painting defined its own criteria for interpretation. Crouched on the floor showing us his new art books, he was teaching us visual literacy.

Beyond the classroom

Several years after finishing my MFA, I began teaching at California State University, East Bay. Over the years, Wayne always asked how my teaching was going. He even drove out to give a lecture to one of my classes. What a rush when students discover they can see and understand — they only need tips on where to look. Like Wayne’s classes, mine were a “shared laboratory of experience.” And like Wayne, I stayed in touch with some students, now friends, who graduated long ago.

Wayne Thiebaud was utterly without pretension. He was the same Wayne in black tie or cargo pants. When we met to see a Richard Diebenkorn show in Sacramento, I’d watch him looking. He’d bend close to a painting, hands behind his back. To examine details, he’d reach into his windbreaker and put a second pair of pharmacy glasses over the first.

In a 2021 interview with Karen Wilkin, he said:
“Having faith in the process and the sheer attractiveness of making your own worlds. This is what I love. I would like to be able to paint anything, any subject matter, any kind of painting I find challenging. If you find painting as an extension of yourself . . . when you glory in the moment when that brush comes to some little mark or color or line that completes a sequence of relationships . . . there’s nothing better. So painting is such a joy and such a challenge that it tells you it’s impossible, but it’s possible to contend with its impossibilities.”
— Wayne Thiebaud

Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art is on view at the Legion of Honor through August 17, 2025.