Bay Area American artist Wayne Thiebaud passed away on Sunday at the age of 101. Born a century ago in 1920 in Mesa, Arizona, and raised in southern California, he is best known for his depictions of American fast food and everyday subject matter.

However, his output goes beyond this as he was also a supreme landscape artist and an excellent interpreter of the human figure. His painting career took off in the mid-1950’s.

Four Sundaes. Photo: Wikiart

He started out first as a graphic designer and a cartoonist. This latter ability shines in his iconic depictions of burgers, cakes, pastries, sweets and ice-creams arranged in rows, as if enticing their purchase by the clients of confectionaries, diners and cafeterias.

These works are sometimes too summarily labelled as essentially demonstrating a pop nature in the spirit of the giants of Pop Art Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist.

Warhol’s comment, such as in his famous Campbell Soup Cans, was ironic whereas Thiebaud was more interested in the comic, while addressing a collective American nostalgia for its sweet food industry and maybe stereotyping it. Thiebuad reinterpreted the traditional still-life genre to mirror an age where mass production and consumption took the upper hand.

Flatland River. Photo: Wikiart

Thiebaud’s landscapes are a different kettle of fish. Although he was still after the chromatic pop vibrancy, being a Bay Area artist, the landscapes illustrate this Bay Area nuance effectively.

His friendship with fellow Bay Area artist Richard Diebenkorn inspired him to attempt landscape and deviate from his staple output of confectionary-themed work. In the 1970s, Thiebaud dedicated himself fully to the landscape genre, showing his responsiveness to Diebenkorn’s ideas of landscape painting.

The two artists shared similar compositional traits in the verticality of structures and gridded patterns. The bird’s eye vantage point is more pronounced in Thiebaud; he pursues a painterly order in his signature depiction of farms, fields, topographical elements such as meandering rivers and channels of the countryside in the neighbourhood of Sacramento, which was where he lived for many years.

Farm Channel. Photo: Wikiart

While Diebenkorn’s landscapes are sometimes very abstract and show a superior aptitude towards abstraction and colour-field painting, Thiebaud was more schematised through his compositional compartmentalisation and overwhelming intensity.

This probably provided inspiration for David Hockney’s landscapes. Thiebaud always stressed that he painted from memory and that the composition was ‘constructed’. This imbues them with an otherworldly, dreamlike dimension in which colour holds reign. In his words: “The attempt is to express as effectively as I can a sense of equilibrium and disequilibrium so that they are somewhat discomforting.”

Five Seated Figures. Photo: Dutch News Digest

His illustrative style flows into his oeuvre of portraits and humanity. These works have a comic strip quality about them, however not in the spirit of pop artist Roy Lichtenstein. Thiebaud’s people are static, sometimes placed in rows like in his paintings of pastries and hotdogs, evoking a strong sense of static detachment from reality.

Sometimes two or more individuals people these paintings and, as in Hockney’s similarly-themed work, they radiate mutual and uncomfortable indifference to each other. One could maybe draw comparisons with pre-Renaissance sacred art in which saints and divine creatures didn’t seem to communicate between themselves.

Thiebaud's second wife Betty Jean died in 2015. His son Paul died in 2010. He is survived by two daughters, a son and six grandchildren.