Gun

Wayne Thibaud's Gun evokes nostalgia for the "wild west" of dime store comic books and American mythology. A painting of a child's toy, the image projects a multiplicity of meaning. It is both immediately sentimental and dangerous; a playful childhood souvenir and violent weapon. The artist's choice of subject -a found object, a common American toy, a mass-produced trinket- links him to the Pop Art school that dominated the New York scene at this time. Indeed, the placement of the lone, discarded gun in an empty white field resembles a frame from a comic book story -perhaps from the end, when the hero has kicked the gun safely away from the villain's outstretched hand.

Yet whatever the artist's source material, the treatment of the subject is pure Thiebaud: the gun's form is rendered in thick impasto, with luscious curls of paint. The dark form is outlined in bright colors which animate it against the bright white background. The gun has a cheery, unthreatening presence, as if it were interchangeable with any of Thiebaud's regular "props" like a cupcake or a teddy bear. The power lies in the viewer's familiarity with this toy, which is a stand-in for the rather frightening real thing. In a manner similar to Richard Prince's iconic yet ironic Cowboys, Thiebaud's Gun recalls a powerful yet clichéd image, indeed a banal object, that is symbolic of so many things uniquely American: consumerism, cultural nostalgia as well as sovereignty and the mythology of frontierism and true grit.