Interview of Wayne Thiebaud by Charles Strong

Sacramento, California, February 2004

CS: It's a pleasure to talk to you today and I'd like to talk to you about your career and painting in general. Your work made an enormous impact in 1962 with the Allan Stone exhibition in New York and the deYoung exhibition in San Francisco. And from there, the rest is a very long and marvelous history. Let's begin by talking about your early training.

In the thirties, you studied advertising, art, and cartooning. I believe the cartooning came first with the apprenticeship at Walt Disney?

WT: Cartooning was and is still a big love of mine, and the love of caricature. I didn't really have a chance to study in the sense of a formal or academic institution, but I had a lot of wonderful and kind people who showed me how to do things from painting signs to fashion illustration-designers who would take time out to show how ignorant I was about what I was doing. And that was a blessing. It was a very good kind of apprenticeship, an informal apprenticeship in a great variety of ways. And I loved all of that and still have a great respect and interest in designers and cartoonists. That whole area I think is something which meant a lot and still means a lot to me and I think obviously had a lot to do with how I go about the work.

CS: What about the theater background that you had?

WT: I think that may have been a trifle overstressed, but I did in high school work in the stage crew and have since been interested in particularly local theater designing. But it's a fairly small part, except for being very much interested in drama and its presentation and how it does relate, after all, to the kind of painting, stage of painting, the box of painting, the way in which things are presented. In some ways, window display, which I did, I suppose relates to that sort of dramatic world. Spotlighting, probably, working at Universal Studios and watching them in those days set up the lighting procedures on movie lots. I worked in the advertising department and not in the production of film, but had access to watching how those dramatic film lightings occurred. I was fascinated with how long it took them to light a set and how careful they were. So, in that sense, your question I think is very apropos and does have some bearing.

CS: Then you went into the war… and were doing cartooning…

WT: Right, and poster designing. I went in to become a pilot but found options which were much more interesting because I got to work with special services and developed a little cartoon strip, worked on camp newspapers, posters, all kinds of related activities. I was very fortunate.

CS: The one assignment that sounded rather ominous was where you were making maps for the Japanese invasion.

WT: That was very late in my service. As a matter of fact, I was put into commando training at the time of the Battle of the Bulge. And what saved me was the commanding officer pulled me off that detail just before I was ready to go and wanted me to paint a portrait of his wife from a photograph. So, doing that saved me from having any kind of real active war service. But right after that I went through an investigatory procedure to see if I could be assigned to a secret project. And the secret project turned out to be located in the old Hal Roche Studios, redesigned to make this elaborate, full scale map of Japanese islands. And the artists were pulled there to make these models from stereoscopic photographs to make these amazing reduplications of the Japanese islands, which were photographed as if the pilots were actually flying over them. Overhead cameras would move over them with fake clouds coming under them and everything so that the pilots could have dead reckoning for bombing. It was such an effective plan and project that it got a medal of commendation. But I got there on VJ Day, so I ended up playing basketball with Ronald Reagan who was one of the commanding officers, and I also worked throwing out films, and actually doing some films on evacuation instruction. Then I was discharged.

CS: Fascinating. So what happened after the war?

WT: I went back to try to sell cartoons in New York and went with another cartoonist friend, Monroe Leung (we were in the service together), a wonderful fellow. After about a month he decided to come home, and I ended up trying to sell cartoons.