"But on closer inspection, his pictures of idealized pies, spaghetti entanglements of highways and gumball machines rimmed in blue halos required unpacking."

"A rustling of unexpected sadness occasionally crept into the paintings after that initial leaping rush of joy — an unsentimental nostalgia for a bygone era or some long lost love.... ... Mr. Thiebaud’s pictures were the opposite of mechanical-looking, their slathered surfaces as rich and thick as the icing on his painted layer cakes. This tactile luxuriousness was one of the things that separated him from classic Pop painting.... 'It has never ceased to thrill and amaze me,' he said, 'the magic of what happens when you put one bit of paint next to another. I wake up every morning and paint.... I’ll be damned but I just can’t stop.'" 

From "Wayne Thiebaud, Playful Painter of the Everyday, Dies at 101/Mr. Thiebaud’s rich and luminous depictions of midcentury Americana separated him from the classic Pop Art of the time" by Michael Kimmelman (NYT).