Getting Up Close and Personal With Art
/I love getting up close and personal with a painting.
At a distance, this painting of three cakes on display is simple, and quite satisfying in that simplicity. The artist Wayne Thiebaud came back over and over to this theme of commercially-produced Americana desserts over the course of his career (fun game: if you see a painting in a modern art museum of a dessert that looks like it could be proudly on display in a diner, look to see if it's by Thiebaud).
This repetition allowed him to explore possibilities in his painting technique. He often surrounded the objects he painted with halos of multiple colors, only visible if you look closely. He said the colors are “fighting for position. That’s what makes them vibrate when you put them next to each other.”
I didn't know any of that when I came across this painting at @sfmoma a few years ago. There was something soothing and appealing about the cakes, and I felt pulled to walk right up to the painting and put my nose in it. I was surprised by how textural the surface was; it actually looked like the paint had been applied to the canvas as thick as frosting. And there were so many colors along the lines of the cakes, adding energy to the static objects. What had looked serene at a distance looked vibrant and alive up close.
Where you're standing can change how you see.
Do you let yourself get up close to paintings in museums? It can feel audacious and even intimidating at first. But it is an interesting way to understand how the artist worked to create the overall effect of the painting.
When I see brushstrokes on a canvas, I feel connected to the artist as a human being, across space and time, in that moment of applying paint to a canvas, in the act of making art.
Display Cakes, Wayne Thiebaud, 1963, oil on canvas, SFMOMA
