“These landscapes are fanciful yet grounded. They are airy yet planted. They are fluid yet mappable. The viewer can river-float through a landscape, balloon-float over a landscape, and yet plant corn all at once.”
A rich and rhythmic example of Wayne Thiebaud at his best, Middle Island from 1997 memorializes the artist’s connection with California’s Sacramento River Delta. Having been his home for decades, Thiebaud depicts this personal landscape with masterful craftsmanship and attention to detail. Executed on an intimate scale, Middle Island is a particularly warm and sensual example of his Delta paintings and drawings, a series which he began in the late 1990s, the present work captures the Delta’s winding rivers and vast agricultural plains, all the while carrying with it the rich legacy of American landscape painting. As in all of Thiebaud’s work, he has a unique way of infusing feelings of memory and nostalgia. Middle Island displays a familiarity, much like the artist’s paintings of confections, and it draws specifically on Thiebaud’s fond childhood memories of his grandfather’s California farm: “I plowed, harrowed, dug, and hitched up teams […] and planted and harvested alfalfa, potatoes, corn [...] It was a great way to grow up. These paintings have something to do with the love of that and in some ways the idea of replicating that experience” (the artist in: Exh. Cat., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (and traveling), Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective, 2000, p. 33).
In Middle Ground, a sweeping and seemingly infinite landscape fills the picture plane like a tapestry, with no horizon to orient a viewer or to comprehend the extent of depth in the picture. In the present work, Thiebaud demonstrates a compression of expansive space into a foreshorted perspective, giving the viewer an expansive and all-encompassing view of the landscape, a distinctive departure from the elongated proportions and vertiginous hills of the artist’s San Francisco cityscapes. He repeated the Sacramento River Delta scene in many different ways in both painting and drawing, each time slightly different and from different vantage points, but almost all grounded by the sweeping river. Much like Monet’s Haystacks, Thiebaud expressed various seasons and views of the same landscape. The Delta works take on a modern take on the tradition of American landscape paintings, much like Richard Diebenkorn’s landscapes that also explore lines, color and abstraction. With its invocation of the sublime beauty of the American West, Middle Island invites viewers to luxuriate in the sensual pleasure of the landscape.
