Wayne Thiebaud’s 2001 landscape, Levee and Cow, renders the levees and cultivated fields of the Sacramento River Delta in the artist’s signature, candy-colored hues. The composition is divided across the center by a creamy road, populated by the work’s titular cow, standing in blue shadow at far left, and a crop of trees in flaming reds and spring greens at right. Below the road, the mottled red and blue of the levee descends to the bank, where the river reflects the cow, rainbow brush, and trees above. In the upper half of the composition, Thiebaud’s perspective shifts; the horizon line is pushed off the upper border of the canvas as the artist widens the visual plane into a pastel patchwork of fields. The juxtapositions of contrasting colors and intersecting planes recall the repetitions of cakes and pies in Thiebaud’s still lifes, while thick ridges of impasto, once used to create soft custards and creams, here bring to mind the sharp geometry of industrial fields of corn and wheat. Levee and Cow combines a myriad of art historical references—“Western, Eastern—and the use of everything I could think of,” per Thiebaud, in order to best represent his beloved California landscape.ⁱ

 

 

Thiebaud began work on landscape paintings inspired by the Sacramento River Delta in the mid-1990s.ⁱⁱ He had owned a home on the delta previously, but it wasn’t until his San Francisco cityscapes of the early 1990s that the artist wondered whether he couldn’t apply the same principles of perspective, “a kind of composite of several things at once,” to landscape.ⁱⁱⁱ Working first en plein air, like the European Barbizon and Impressionist artists, and their American counterparts, the Hudson River School, Thiebaud combined multiple sketches into each imaginative landscape. He described his process in a 2001 interview (the same year he created Levee and Cow) as “going out on the delta and on those levies [sic] and looking, making direct paintings, some drawings; and, like with the city pictures, then coming back and trying to combine ‘em…”^iv

 

 

“The wonderful patterns and design motifs that crop up in agriculture fascinate me.”
—Wayne Thiebaud

The artist utilizes multiple vanishing points in Levee and Cow, drawing the eye through sharp-edged fields and country roads, across a polka-dotted orchard to the grove of trees and pinstriped crop rows, and finally, along the riverbank, below. Thiebaud cites Chinese landscape paintings as his inspiration here, particularly, “the way in which that perspective is so different.”^v Such paintings are executed on scrolls that must be unfurled, section by section, meaning that the landscape is only visible one part at a time. The durational element affords the artist the opportunity to shift perspectives throughout the work, as if taking the viewer along a wandering path, through mountains and plains, or across a river.

 

 

Thiebaud embraces this technique in Levee and Cow across vertical, horizontal, and diagonal axes. As in the Chinese landscape tradition, he includes tiny elements, like the cow, to convey the grand scale of the landscape and to encourage close-looking. The viewer can imagine themselves “going out on the delta” with Thiebaud, taking in the fields, levee, and riverbank, in turn. “For me, painting has a lot to do with the exercise of empathy,” Thiebaud said, “where you have to believe that you’re walking the path or under the trees, that you are somehow able to transfer yourself into that picture.”^vi In other words, Thiebaud uses pictorial representation in Levee and Cow as a way to access a feeling, or experience of a place, that conveys more than what is strictly visible to the naked eye.^vii

 

 

The brighter-than-life colors of Levee and Cow, inspired by the color palettes of the Impressionists and Fauves, further contribute to the emotional resonance of the work. Thiebaud uses color to add “a little more about the experience in that world. Various seasons, for instance,” recalling Claude Monet’s practice of painting the same scene, repeatedly, using color to capture the changing effect of light.^viii But where Monet distributes the changing light across multiple canvases, as in his haystacks series, to name just one, Levee and Cow brings disparate seasons and perspectives together on one canvas. This effect gives the impression that, not only is the viewer taking a walk with Thiebaud on the delta, but they are experiencing multiple walks, in various seasons, at once.

“Sometimes you’d get this very brown, black, dark, barren atmosphere and environment. And then spring, of course, you get these great spring greens and the sort of flourishing, almost flower-like colors of the crops, the yellows and the oranges. So the pictures try in some way to anthologize or balance, bring that together.”
—Wayne Thiebaud

The upper half of Levee and Cow blossoms into springtime, while the lower half, perhaps, rests in a cool, autumnal stillness. Thiebaud’s signature halation effect, wherein he brings out the brightness of one color through a stippled halo of its complement—pale yellow against spring green, for instance—recalls the particular effect of sunlight on a riverside walk. Reflected off the water, sparkling into the tall grass, the sun seems more brilliant than it really is.

 

 

ⁱ Wayne Thiebaud, quoted in Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2000, p. 33.

ⁱⁱ John Yau et al., California Landscapes: Richard Diebenkorn, Wayne Thiebaud, exh. cat., Acquavella Galleries, new York, 2018, p. 21.

ⁱⁱⁱ Thiebaud, quoted in “Oral history interview with Wayne Thiebaud, 2001 May 17-18,” transcript, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, online.

^iv Ibid.

^v Ibid.

^vi Thiebaud, quoted in Lauren Palmor, “Shaping the Land: Wayne Thiebaud’s Ponds and Streams,” Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (blog), May 20, 2021, online.

^vii Richard Wollheim, “Wayne Thiebaud,” Artforum, Oct. 1999, p. 135.

^{​​​​​​​viii} Thiebaud, quoted in “Oral history interview with Wayne Thiebaud.”