Let *us* eat Cake!

Drawing (and eating) delight with Wayne Theibaud

Welcome, my creative, charming, and exceptionally good-looking Grown Ups Table friends. So happy you’re here.

Last week, we learned all about we see value in hue, and drew with “All The Wrong Colors.” Seeing all the drawings you made in the chat was a delight. I’m still marveling at the daring, bold color choices everyone made. Also, let’s be real: that lesson was not easy! Everyone took some real risks. I am so impressed at how we leap and grow together. Throwing “the right way” out the window, loosening our grip on the outcome, and wrapping our arms around the experience of drawing. Hooray for making “all wrong” drawings on purpose.

All right, I promised you something light and fun this week. So let me serve this up:

Cake.

Cake!? YES, CAKE. Friends, the delight and deliciousness of cake is exactly what we need right now.

Maira Kalman knows what’s up:

Words of wisdom from the GUT’s first visiting artist, Maira Kalman, in her delightful book Cake

Let Us Eat Cake

When times are tough and injustice is rampant at the highest levels, we must speak up, resist, and fight. And, at the same time, it’s also important to remind ourselves of what we are fighting for. If we lose track of the joy and love we want to see in the world, then what is the point of the struggle? Enter cake.

Now, I’m not saying we are struggling for sweets, but a cake is a symbol of joy, appreciation, and community. It takes time, care, and love to create a cake for someone. We enjoy it to celebrate people we love, or accomplishments we’ve achieved, together. (And, if you’re like me, maybe sometimes you enjoy a piece solo, over the sink! LOL.)

Experiencing moments of joy, beauty, and pleasure together reminds us of the direction we want to grow in, and what want to experience more of in our lives. ¹

Hungry anyone? Photograph courtesy of Public Programs, Legion of Honor

San Francisco art museum, the Legion of Honor, recently held a massive outdoor CAKE event to celebrate the opening of a phenomenal new retrospective of the work of Bay Area painter, Wayne Theibaud, titled “Art Comes from Art.” The event also celebrated, well, Cake - for cakes sake.

People personally baked over a thousand cakes and brought them to the Legion of Honor for all to enjoy. Everyone displayed their cakes, and if you brought a cake to share, you got to refill your cake box with pieces from other people’s cakes. The event wasn’t just a spectacular exhibition of the art of cake baking, but also the art of the gift. A true display of communal and reciprocal creativity.

(Let’s do more art/food/community events like this, everyone! Feel free to bring cake to my studio anytime. Will trade for art supplies.)

Learning to bake — or more learning to cook, I’d say — is a lot like learning to make art. It’s a lot of trying, making mistakes, and trying again. There are basic tools and materials that are helpful to undertsand. If it’s new to us, we may look to people who have done it for a while to teach us - someone who can explain the basics, but in a fun way, without getting too much in the weeds. We experiment, play around, do our best. And we have fun, especially when we do it with others we love and trust and can laugh with. Then, one day, we put that cake in the oven/put our pen to paper, and something magic happens. Something surprising emerges. Often it’s something even better than we expected. We start to see how we create.

Just as there are NO RULES IN ART. There’s no wrong way to make a cake, eat a cake, draw a cake. You can incorporate different flavors, tinker with the texture, and play around as you like. And if you decide to forgo the oven and just eat the batter?! ALL THE BETTER.²

So let’s get on to making some art-cakes

The Cakes of Wayne Thiebaud

Wayne Thiebaud, Display Cakes (1963)

Againt, this huge gathering of cakes at the Legion of Honor was a celebration of a new exhibition “Art Comes from Art” highlighting the art of Bay Area painter extraordinaire Wayne Thiebaud. This exhibition explores the ways Thiebaud was, in his own words, “an obsessive thief.” He reinterpreted the work of other artists, from Diego Velázquez to Claude Monet to his friend Richard Diebenkorn. He was a big proponent of copying art (kind of like using a recipe!) as a way to learn and find your own artistic voice.

“Good artists copy, great artists steal.” — Pablo Picasso

If you don’t already have my friend Austin Kleon’s inspiring book on artistic theft and creativity, Steal Like an Artist, I highly recommend!

Thiebaud respectfully stole a ton over the years. ³ It wasn’t until he started painting the bakery cases he remembered from his childhood that he developed his own distinct voice as an artist. His paintings of cakes (and much of his work) are gestural and thick as icing. You can see his brushstrokes, which is to say his hand and his body, in every cake. Whereas pop artists’ work of the same era can feel more mechanical and flat, they were more a product of mass reproduction and a cool disassociation derived from capitalism (ahem, can you say Warhol??) Thiebaud on the other hand was a painter. His paintings are about painting, maybe even more than they are about cake.

Detail of Wayne Thiebaud, Cakes & Pies (1994-1995)

Thiebaud was also a celebrated educator. He taught painting for decades, first at Sacramento City College and then at UC Davis. When students got stuck, he would urge them to start copying a painting and see what inclinations of their own started to occur as they did so. Students also fondly recalled him speaking to them as a peer — sharing his love of painting instead of talking down to them.

He believed in being part of a community of artists, across the generations and even across the centuries. He also believed in joy, saying, “I like to see people smiling when they look at my paintings.”⁴

This week, let’s take inspiration from Thiebaud’s love of cake, community, and joy…