Color Interaction

Wayne Thiebaud's Sweets and Treats from http://tillagearts.blogspot.com/2009/10/go-see-sweets-treats-wayne-thiebaud-in.html 

real cakes reproduced from Thiebaud's painting

Wayne Thiebaud is an amazing contemporary painter that plays with color interactions. Thiebaud is well known for painting pastries and other mass cultural objects. Moreover, he states that he often paints from memories either from childhood or previous job experiences. He was associated with the Pop Art movement, and his work influence the era.

Thiebaud uses heavy pigments and solid colors in his paintings. Painting warm and cool color is how he uses as light and shadows. Most of the color paint are visually seen in his colorful paintings except pure black and white. White pigments, however, are usually used as background that creates a lot of negative space. But when looking at the paintings, you will not think it is visually white because of color illusion. Sometimes he does add little color to the white background, but not often.

The Cakes and Treats paintings were designed with color unity and harmony. The colors are bright and solid with major warm colors and a touch of cool colors as shadows. Through the dominance of warm colors, the blue shadows seemed to have a touch of red and become slightly purple. This type of illusion is color juxtaposition, which creates color combination when two pigments appear simultaneously. 

Thiebaud layered many bold colors on top of each other, and it creates the bezold effect like a visual gradation. This technique simplified the details but gives connection between two different pigments. Thiebaud’s style is contemporary, and he uses bold colors with huge white space that gives light intensity.

Thiebaud’s work always has a strong contrast, and the mass production product paintings also have huge negative space. These are his most identified techniques.