3:03

“It’s so mysterious what makes a painting somehow to be able to become a reality of its own. I’m convinced it’s one of the most difficult things in the world to do. It’s what keeps you going, I guess.” — Wayne Thiebaud

Happy Birthday to the great painter Wayne Thiebaud, born on November 15, 1920, in Mesa, Arizona. You read that correctly, Wayne Thiebaud is 99 (ninety-nine) years old today! And he is still painting nearly every day – he sure does keep going, we guess.

Thiebaud is currently featured in an outstanding exhibition at Acquavella Galleries in New York, Wayne Thiebaud Mountains 1965-2019, open now through December 13. In an exclusive first look at this video from Acquavella, Thiebaud talks about his inspirations, from his time growing up in Utah and how mountains came to be such important subjects of his paintings.

From Acquavella Galleries:

While Thiebaud is most often acclaimed for his bright and upbeat paintings of desserts and everyday objects, Thiebaud’s depictions of California mountains have been an enduring focus of the artist’s practice for more than 50 years. The works in the exhibition are comprised of a range of media, including acrylic, charcoal, graphite, oil and watercolor on board, canvas and paper.

Distinct from traditional landscape paintings, Thiebaud’s mountain series invokes at once the conflicting natures of abstraction and representation. The works on view concentrate on the Sierra Nevada range and feature the artist’s immediately recognizable exaggerated palette, and meticulous impasto technique while introducing experiments with skewed perspective and sense of scale. To fully interpret his immense and daunting subjects the artist eliminates all signs of human presence. The abstracted, yet material mountains present the grandeur of nature’s force.

Video produced by Bower Blue.