Orange Substrate

Pop artist Wayne Thiebaud, who taught for a long time here at UC Davis and whose paintings of cakes grace student dorm walls all these years later in print form, is probably responsible for the current wave of Central Valley landscape artists insisting on an orange edge to everything.

Part of this is in the landscape, of course: this is land-of-orange, orange dirt, orange dust, orange buckwheat drying to rust, orange sunsets that turn to deep purple with the dust in the air after the sun goes down.

It’s like a signature, this line. It says I’ve looked at Thiebaud’s landscapes. I’ve seen the orange. And now I’m going to teach you to see it too.

Whether this orange line is enough to constitute a school is not for me to say, but as I sit here looking at the kitchen window (it’s dark out) and see the marigolds, dried and hanging, from our wedding two years ago, I’m willing to see orange in things around here. I even bought some orange block printing ink over the weekend to experiment with some monoprints. I’ll let you know how I get on.