The Art of the Laguna Art Museum
Wayne Thiebaud, Clown and Circle (2015)
My friend Kathy and I love to do adventures together. She owns The Distinguished Speaker Series, which brings wonderful speakers to Southern California providing an adventure of learning to all her patrons! We are kindred spirits in seeking out new activities and knowledge. We both love to travel and when budgets are tight, which is most of the time, we hike, bike or drive to a destination adventure. This particular Saturday we decided to drive down to Laguna and have lunch by the sea and check out a few of their art galleries. What a cute town. Super crowded as we were there in May after having our vaccination shots and the town was full of open shops, although we still wore masks inside, and lots of folks walking around. After visiting a few galleries, we wanted to go to the ocean and find a place for lunch on the water. To our surprise, we stumbled upon The Laguna Art Museum, right next to a Mexican restaurant overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and decided to postpone lunch and have a look.
There was a large banner with upside-down clown ice cream cones on it advertising their current Wayne Thiebaud art exhibit, Wayne Thiebaud: Clowns. I didn’t know there was an art museum in Laguna I am ashamed to admit. I always associate Laguna with The Pageant of the Masters and great art galleries. I also love Wayne Thiebaud’s art and was surprised to find circus and clown paintings in the exhibit. When I worked at SFMOMA getting their audio tour up and running before they opened for the first time, we had the honor of interviewing Wayne from his home near Sacramento, California. It is such a privilege to hear the artist’s voice firsthand describe their art. I always associate Thiebaud with his thick frosting-like paint application of cakes, pies and landscapes - not clowns. He painted them later in his life and I believe he is in his 90’s and still working today. I highly recommend this show. It is a small gallery, and you can get up close and really see the details of his brush strokes and we had the whole gallery to ourselves which was nice. I always associated Thiebaud’s art with being “happy”, but this show had some underlying dark tones in it. Or perhaps that is just the subject of clowns in art. If you are freaked out by clowns do not go to this show!
Continuing to explore the rest of the museum was wonderful. After chatting with a gallery attendant, I learned that the museum only collects and exhibits artwork by California artists. I remember when I discovered California artists called the Society of Six and the Bay Area Figurative Artists in art school, and I am glad there is a place for these wonderful art history chapters in our California history as well as room for new California artists at the Laguna Art Museum. Oh, and have lunch next door at Las Brisas, the Mexican restaurant…it was delicious!