JANET BISHOP: I’m Janet Bishop, curator of painting and sculpture at SFMOMA.  I had the chance recently to sit down with painter Wayne Thiebaud to look closely at Green Bowl, which is one of his favorites from our collection.  

WAYNE THIEBAUD:  The space is the kind of space which is so compressed and so flat.  And when she introduced this dish, and placed it on a little table, you got this enormous amount of  pressure down.  And I think she’s used a palette knife.  In any event, there is a lot of flattening and that’s really satisfying to me.  

JANET BISHOP:   Despite the fact that the paint itself is clearly so heavy and choppy, I see what he means here about the flattening. The way the table is tilted up so that it’s almost in plane with the canvas.  The green color is such a big thrill. and I love how she incorporates that brightness next to the more earthy muddy colors that dominate the rest of the canvas.