Mariposaaah!!!

"24th Street Intersection" by Wayne Thiebaud

The artist Wayne Thiebaud is known for his paintings of “cakes, pastries…and toilets,” but this 1977 interpretation of a mythical intersection at 24th Street and Mariposa, submitted by friend o’ the blog Jacki, is our favorite – for obvious reasons.

Thiebaud once said:

“I was playing around with the abstract notions of edge – I was fascinated, living in San Francisco, by the way different streets just came in and then just vanished. So I sat out on a street corner and began to paint them.” It was the “sense of edges appearing, things swooping around their own edges that I loved,” he recounted (Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2000, p. 58).

(via Goldenfiddlr)

5 thoughts on “Mariposaaah!!!”

  1. Where is that? I don’t know Mariposa offhand, and google maps only turns up a Mariposa street that’s parallel to 24th…

  2. ha, good point. i’m gonna assume the artist worked off a photo and titled the piece based on an error. that, or the fact that Mariposa doesn’t intersect 24th is part of the painter’s abstraction.

  3. I’m curious to see the spot in person…hmm.

    (Did you add “mythical” to the post since I commented or am I just really spacey?)

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