Things of Our Longing: Thiebaud and Morandi
I’ve mentioned Wayne Thiebaud in passing in this space a couple of times. I honestly thought I’d talked about him more! I also enjoy Morandi. A while back I bought the book Wayne Thiebaud at Museo Morandi and it’s really great to see one artist interacting with another’s work. I think this is where the interesting stuff really happens. I like reading a lot of art history/criticism, but there’s something about the way an artist sees that is just more real for me, in general. Thiebaud was so articulate! I’m also interested in these sorts of cross-pollination of ideas, excellence speaking to excellence. The book is an interview with the late Thiebaud (he died in 2021) and Alessia Masi on the painter Morandi. She notes that Morandi’s subject — the bottles and vases — embodied his deepest thoughts. She calls Morandi’s work “a whispered poetic song, resistant and persistent that expresses his world view.” She then asks WT about how his own work expresses his world view.
Thiebaud says that he’s putting down “tattletale evidence of what we are as people. Introducing things of our longing or when we have a sense of intimacy.” On Morandi, Thiebaud says that there is a “wonder of intimacy and the love of long looking. Of staring but at the same time moving the eye, finding out what’s really there, and there are so many things that are subtle and may look like something at one moment but not the next.”
When asked about process Thiebaud talks about how Morandi would do maybe a hundred little 3 inch by 2 inch thumbnail sketches to get his compositions right before he would begin a work. All of that pre-work! And Thiebaud did a lot of drawing too, but he says he also did “a lot of reading. I read a lot of poetry.” And this, of course I love. Because so much goes unseen into a painting, but you’ll rarely find a great artist who doesn’t have extensive knowledge of art and the history of art. And obviously, reading poetry doesn’t hurt either. (My own husband is an example of this).
As ever, the only real secret to creativity, is to work, to be creative, to be obsessed, to look at art, to read. You never hear of any successful artist talk about their secret being to go to cocktail parties, or art shows or poetry readings. (Though those can all be lovely things).
We know all the secrets to creativity. We already know them. But it’s good to hear them from other people in other fields of creativity, perhaps, than our own. There was a wonderful On Being interview with rock star music producer Rick Rubin,
Rubin: It’s things that I notice and the things that we notice are fleeting. [laughs] So it’ll come up and I’ll make notes on the things that I’m noticing and they’ll work their way into the book. And then I can look back years later now and read some of it and be shocked by what’s there. Not because it’s not accurate, but that I didn’t know that I knew it. I don’t know it, but I recognized it in that moment, was able to capture it in that moment. And that’s, I’ll say, that’s similar to what happens in the recording studio, is we tend to record everything because often it happens when you don’t know it’s happening.
Tippett: Yeah, well that’s the magic, right? That’s the mystery of creating. RIght. And I think that’s a primary reason I write is to learn what I know. [laughs]
(The famous Warhol line comes to mind here: “Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.”)
There’s a part about where Rubin talks about a computer beating a Grandmaster of the game Go which is really compelling and which is cool because it reminds us that there is always new space for a creative leap. Another piece of advice Rubin gives is: “to learn and be fascinated and surprised on a continual basis.”
Another thing he talks about is how the basketball coach John Wooden came in to work with some pros and he “spends the whole first practice teaching everyone how to tie their shoes.” And he says, “Yeah. How to put their socks on properly and how to properly tie their, lace up and tie their shoes. You know it’s so — And it would be like a kindergarten class. But his point was that every detail matters. And it’s not the best way to do the extreme version of what you’re doing, it’s how you do every step, every piece leading up to it. All of the practices involved.”
And so to bring that back to the practices of Morandi and Thiebaud, yes, it’s this thing that artists get: every detail matters. You might think, ah that sounds boring. Art and making is supposed to be fun, a bit wild, carefree. Then we remember Morandi’s line, “nothing is more abstract than reality.” My own partner Rob paints using a grid system and he often talks about how each square in his poetic realism style work is a lot like an abstract painting when you break it down. So in this regimented system of his, there’s so much play! It’s in the details that the fun happens. You need the basics so engrained though, so that then you can remember to have fun. (Because you really do need to play, too, you need the fun).
Thiebaud says that “a painter in order to have a picture really feel the fullness of life needs to use glowing light, glinting light, glaring light, light which is very effusive, out-of-focus, in focus.” And isn’t this all also just attention attention attention?
Another thing that I found inspiring that Thiebaud talks about is his subject matter. He says he was lucky enough to just go, “I think I’m just going to paint whatever I want when I want to paint it. I’m not going to give up any kind of subject matter that tickles my fancy.”
I guess I’m just looking for validation for wanting to try all the photography :) Case in point, I’ve always wanted to riff on Wayne Thiebaud’s paintings of cakes in my still life series, and now I have! It tickled my fancy, you know?
