Sketchbook No.2 (#2)

Up Cuthbert Street, 27 October 1991
(2B pencil in A4 sketchbook)

I'd recently discovered the paintings of Wayne Thiebaud when I drew this. Trying to capture something of his vertiginous San Francisco views, I chose one of the steeper streets in Gateshead and looked up Cuthbert Street to the  houses on Bensham Road.

I don't think I really caught Thiebaud's essence, but looking at this drawing now, complete with colour notes, I think it might still make an interesting painting.

Sweet Things

Purple and Green (work in progress)

Over a year ago, I planned a small painting of two Quality Street chocolates to go on the lid of a Xmas present. For one reason or another, the painting never got started, but because I knew finishing Shark Rock wouldn't take too long, I was looking for something new to start and came across the source material yesterday.

In the studio is a carton of 8 x 8 inch canvases I bought last year with a view to making some small paintings of food inspired by Wayne Thiebaud's wonderful cakes, so pulled one of them out and took it to the Club.

I rather like the arrangement of the chocolates and had the paint not become overworked in places, I'd have happily pushed on and finished this one today.

The chocolates? They were eaten a long time ago.

More Good Press

Another nice write-up in the 9 November edition of The Courier, Newcastle University's student newspaper. This time I get compared to Hockney, rather than Thiebaud. Who am I to grumble?

I've slipped into The Crack!

Local listings magazine, The Crack, gives Figure8's current show at Red Box the thumbs up in a quarter page review! How absolutely wonderful to be compared with Wayne Thiebaud, high in my pantheon of artist influences. All that looking at his work must be rubbing off.

And again, Wayne Thiebaud

I make no apologies for posting another video about Wayne Thiebaud. The man's work fascinates me and in this video there's a chance to see him applying paint.

Wayne Thiebaud again

Wayne Thiebaud: Interview

I sometimes wonder if my early interest in becoming an illustrator and cartoonist might account for my preferences in painters. Both Edward Hopper and Wayne Thiebaud, the subject of this video, began their careers as illustrator/cartoonist. Maybe it's something to do with the clarity of image and use of strong composition that shows in their paintings.

I love Thiebaud's self-deprecating humour in this interview and am only disappointed that it doesn't feature any of his San Francisco street paintings. Still, although I forget where I found this video, I for one found it a delight. Let me know what you think.

Raimonds Staprans

I’ve been interested in the work of Raimonds Staprans for some time now. He’s a fascinating man: a Latvian-American, he’s celebrated in Latvia as a playwright, in the USA as a painter.

Starting with Diebenkorn, I’ve gradually been exploring a small selection of Bay Area painters. After Diebenkorn came Wayne Thiebaud, then Elmer Bischoff. I was able to pick up books on all three without too much effort, but publications on Staprans eluded me. Until now. Last week I took delivery from Amazon of Raimonds Staprans: Art of Tranquility and Turbulence by Paul Karlstrom.

Karlstrom is clearly something of an expert on Staprans. In the Smithsonian Archive of American Art is an interview Staprans gave to Karlstrom in 1997. It’s a fascinating insight into Staprans’s thoughts about art, the development of his career and how he feels it was held up by staying with one gallery. In particular, his comments about the work of Diebenkorn and Thiebaud are illuminating, even if, at times I think he may be wrong in his conclusions.

I read this interview a couple of years ago, but reading the interview without the benefit of some printed images as illustrations occasionally made for opaque understanding. So it was rewarding in a number of ways to find that a book had finally been published about Staprans and his work.

The pictures in it form something of a retrospective, not surprisingly because it was conceived in connection with a retrospective exhibition of Staprans’s work at the Pasadena Museum of California Art in January 2006 (which then transferred to the Latvian National Museum in Riga).

The paintings begin in the early 196os in a very West Coast abstract way, with hints of de Stael in the blocks of thick colour, but these are gradually replaced by abstract landscapes composed of large areas of broad smooth colour.

In the early 70s, Staprans turned to the female figure for subject matter and there are a number of quite disturbing female nudes, their heads almost non-existent, their genitalia aggressively displayed and the pictures suffused overall with blood red. Staprans has some firmly held views on sexuality which he talks about in the Smithsonian interview and which are the main theme of one of his most famous Latvian plays, The Freezing (excerpted in the book).

Of greatest interest to me are the later landscapes, and some of the still lifes of cans of paint, tables and fruit. The landscapes are quite striking. On first viewing they appear to be severe landscapes with all human life and any incidental detail removed. There’s an eerie silence to them and they’re all bathed in the fierce glare of Californian sunlight.. Staprans says:

As one deplanes in San Francisco, one is blinded by the unbelievable intensity of the sun. And the light is so white and so aggressively energizing, that one automatically gropes for his sunglasses. And so it goes for eight months each year – nothing but blue skies and that blinding light. It is impossible to ignore it.

Yet Staprans maintains that all of them – still lifes and landscapes - are constructs, not taken directly from the real world or real locations at all. He’s working in the field of what he calls abstract realism. He builds his pictures “from the ground up,” making compositional sketches and working with a strict geometry, he attempts to create order out of what he sees as the chaos of the natural world.

San Francisco

My trip to Austin had been paid for by good friends. But it seemed a shame, having gone all that way, not to go the extra distance and finally get to the West Coast. So I stumped up the money from ... funds.

I loved San Francisco as soon as I got there. As we drove in from the airport - we'd been picked up by another friend - there was an obvious difference in the countryside. After Texas's scrubby landscape, with what had looked like tar-paper shacks cowering amongst concrete flyovers, the land round the Bay Area was gorgeous, even in the rain. Green trees and grassy hills, with good-looking houses nestled here and there.

And the city was everything I thought it might be. The wonderful Victorian houses with their woodwork painted in terrific colours, the very European feel of the place. To make things even better, for the rest of our stay there, the weather was glorious, like an early summer day in the UK.

We could not have been better served by my friends there, some of whom I'd only met for the first time on this trip. They took time off work to drive us about. They bought us meals. One guy even drove in from LA and stayed in our hotel for a few days to show us around the city he'd lived in for many years.

I was particularly keen to see some of the WPA murals in San Francisco, so on our first day we stopped off at the Beach Chalet in Golden Gate Park. Difficult to photograph, but the murals are quite lovely. Actually, the whole building is a gem, with decoration in every part. The banisters, for example, are carved into the shape of sea creatures, such as squids.

Later in the day we drove up to The Coit Tower, where the views over the Bay are terrific, from the Golden Gate Bridge over to Alcatraz. There are more WPA murals in the Coit. Great stuff, showing ordinary people working in industry, in hospitals and on farms. Where the windows were set into niches, the niches themselves were disguised with clever trompe l'oeil shelves or bookcases.

I'd let it be known before I went that I was interested in seeing some Wayne Thiebaud paintings, if at all possible, so on the Thursday we were picked up by someone I knew only by name (but who soon became another good friend), who happened to have a pass to the De Young Museum. It's a fine looking building, the biggest in the world to be clad entirely in copper sheeting. When it's had a chance to patinate, it'll be glorious. San Franciscans can be truly proud of it.

Inside I was really in my element. They have an excellent 20th Century American collection and sure enough, three Thiebauds were on display. The earliest was the iconic "Three Machines." Often lumped in with the Pop Art movement, Thiebaud's paintings of gumball machines, pies and cakes are more a genuine celebration of the look of ordinary things than a knowing nod to the art of advertising and commercialism. He has more to do with Chardin than Warhol.

I'd have preferred to find one of his oil paintings of San Franciscan streets, but here was the splendidly wacky "Diagonal Freeway," an acrylic from 1993. Nice to be able to get up close and see some detail.

Further delights included the other great modern landscape painter of the Bay Area, Richard Diebenkorn. There was a lovely little painting called "Seawall," which I don't think I'd ever seen before. And there too was a painting by Elmer Bischoff, which I'm sure might interest Anna. Bischoff is someone I've only recently discovered, so it was a special thrill to find one of his works there.

And, of course, a visit to America wouldn't be the same without a picture by Edward Hopper. Not one I was very familiar with (I can't even find the title), and it was surprising how vibrant the colours were.

Close by was a fine example of Hopper's contemporary, Thomas Hart Benton. I've always had a soft spot for Benton's work, including his Regionalist depictions of Bible stories and this one, in tempera on canvas, is no exception. Susannah slips into a shady pool, her 1930s red strappy high-heeled shoes close at hand, while two geezers look on and discuss her disapprovingly, their rather Hopperesque church set up on a hill in the background.

And I could go on, but it's all in the past now. Look to the future now, it's only just begun ...