Wayne Thiebaud’s Cloud City from 1993-4 is a stunning example of the artists signature fusing of mimetic and fantastical representation, rendering a cityscape that echoes reality while exuding breathtaking, dreamlike qualities. Playing with the traditional conventions of landscape through vertiginous exaggeration, foreshortening and perspectival warping Thiebaud achieves the remarkable feat of imbuing sublimity into the mundane. In addition to the compositional ingenuity that characterize his landscapes, color and brushwork are essential to creating their visual depth and dimensionality. The billowing clouds dominating the sky are voluminous, yielded in a rich impasto which evokes his earlier, iconic confections of the 1960’s with their thick, seemingly whipped, painted layers.

The cityscape and its steep green mountainside are also rendered in a classic Thiebaud palette of sunny yellows and oranges, contrasted with cooler, nuanced shades of purple, blue and grey. Employing a technique now referred to as ‘halation’ within color theory, Thiebaud juxtaposes warm and cool tones to produce a resounding prismatic synergy that contours and electrifies each form off the surface of the canvas.

Of his aims in the genre of landscape painting Thiebaud has said, “I'm not just interested in the pictorial aspects of the landscape—see a pretty place and try to paint it—but in some way to manage it, manipulate it, or see what I can turn it into'" (Karen Tsujimoto, Wayne Thiebaud, Seattle, 1985, p. 25). His masterful manipulation of space, married to a whimsical inventiveness, is displayed in its fullness in Cloud City. His works evoke a specificity of place but utterly resist mundanity, instead they swirl, seemingly alive with magic. The compositional brilliance of Cloud City lays in its perfect balance and exceptional rendering of manmade elements (skyscrapers and paved streets) situated against a divine background of sky filled with two, heavenly, billowing clouds.