The Respect He So Richly Deserves: The Art of Wayne White
The most important lesson they teach in all the prestigious Southern California graduate schools is that once you have earned your important MFA degree, you must never show your art in a restaurant. And yet one of L.A.’s most instantly recognizable signature style painters, Wayne White, kicked off his fine art career in 1998 doing exactly that. While some artists get their big break on the walls of L.A.’s Lowbrow heaven, La Luz De Jesus Gallery, or fight through a decade of group show hell here before breaking into the MOCA-LACMA limelight, Wayne hung his pictures above your bacon and eggs at Fred 62, a designer diner with a Denny’s-style menu and a line of hipsters out the door.
George Carlin had a routine about breakfast diners. He asked where the term “selling like hotcakes” came from, because even a casual observation of breakfast orders at any coffee shop would confirm that eggs sell the best, and yet nobody ever celebrated this fact. Well, at the diner, Wayne White’s paintings sold like eggs, and they continue to do so at solo shows in those proper art galleries for which the artists who all stuck to their MFA rulebook are waiting.
Wayne White’s pictures start with thrift store paintings. In territory mined by other artists from Anthony Ausgang to Fred Beshid (of museumoffred.com fame) and Jim Shaw, White seizes on a startup surface that was a middle class decorator staple in the ‘50s and ‘60s: mass-produced landscapes. Often sold in department stores to accompany furniture sets, they make simple stage settings for White’s pictures, their aged patina only adding to the sincerity of the realistic lakes and hillsides. These lithos and screened paintings depict not only a bygone nineteenth-century wild Americana, but a bygone twentieth-century desire to be connected (albeit synthetically) to that illusion of pastoral pictorial patriotism.
And on this perfectly peaceful backdrop, White presents a theatrical vision rendered as language. Far from word games or puzzles, his stacked and balanced sentences are never shuffled, there is always a clear start and a defi nite finish and no letter is obscured, although the level of alphabetical difficulty alternates from picture to picture. The sentences, aphorisms and cunning linguistics that he so masterfully composes as visual actors on his stage tend to come out of his writing journals; he pulls small phrases like a passage in a
sketchbook. But the play’s the thing, and his script for the scene is most often quite strong, and the actors, the letters themselves, all hit their marks and carry the drama forward for the enjoyment of the audience. And instead of getting doggie bags before they leave the diner, that audience leaves a down payment on a picture at the gallery.
As glamorous as “selling like eggs” can be on the west side of Los Angeles, the artist still has a lot of Chattanooga in him. With a banjo, non-ironic beard and a pleasant, earnest demeanor, he takes me on the long road from his “abstract painting degree” in 1980 at Murfreesboro’s Middle Tennessee State University to preparations for his May 2011 solo show at Western Projects. Located in the L.A./Culver City gallery row, he is showing in the neighborhood that has become the epicenter of art exhibitions in Southern California.
As a writer who does lots of studio visits, I’ve heard many an artist tell their career narrative, been taken on their journeys of self-discovery and regaled in their sense of destiny. And as Wayne started his story in the middle of the Volunteer State while Jimmy Carter was President, I settled into a bit of a relaxed state of mind— had he left the room and I were forced to make a guess, I would never have ventured that this soft-spoken son of the South was going to take me on his life’s journey to success right through Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.
You see, before he was a respectable cerebral sensualist of a fine artist, Wayne White was Nashville’s most notorious punk rock performance puppeteer, contributed comics to New York’s legendary Raw Magazine, waited tables at the Empire Diner and worked for the legendary, seminal pop surrealist Red Grooms. But it was all dwarfed, career-wise, by his association with the little man in the red bowtie who always remembered to say hello to the boys and girls. Talk about a mindshare: a generation grew up on Pee-Wee, mentally inhabiting the stage that came from the mind of Wayne White. It is no coincidence that White’s torque lettering dominates the Americana landscapes on which they are painted with a hyper-zest and drive to stick out and be heard, if only to ensure that it is the viewer that ends the moment with his or her own harsh Pee-Wee-like “Hah-hah!” howling.
And instead of getting doggie bags before they leave the diner, that audience leaves a down payment on a picture at the gallery.”
“Pee-Wee’s Playhouse blew everyone away,” he tells me, “because there was nothing like it on TV at the time. We were a bunch of New York weirdoes. Everything else on TV was done in L.A.” His artistic hero was master cartoon draftsman, R. Crumb, whose influence was combined with an artistic vocabulary of German Expressionism and mid-century cereal and detergent packages; the result was three Emmys for designing the Pee-Wee environment. Wayne was also one of the puppeteers and offers me a roll call recall of all the voices he gave the puppets as they interacted with Paul Reubens for the entertainment of every kid raised in the 1980s. The job led to art directing a string of children’s television shows, directing Peter Gabriel’s “Big Time” video and Smashing Pumpkins’ “Tonight, Tonight.” Along the way, he weaves in stories about stalking cartoonist Art Spiegleman in order to audit his classes at the School of the Visual Arts, being inspired by a young Matt Groening, recalls Gary Painter at the apogee of his rein as king of the punk rock cartooning and meeting new wave cartooning legend Mimi Pond, whom Wayne married and whose work initially brought them to Southern California (Pond wrote the script for the first full-length Simpsons episode).
Of course, what artist’s life-story would be complete without the donning of a massive Lyndon Baines Johnson puppet head in order to properly tell the story of America? Wayne White is not your average studio visit. As he recalls his moves across America and brushes with glory, his paintings around the studio suddenly refl ect a poetic Americana, which might seem slightly jaded, ironic or insincerely kitschy were any other actors or scenery to be added to their compositions. But it is an earnest undertaking with the simple poetry of White’s words and the artistry of the lettering’s hue, shape and shading. The end results are unique paintings in an art world glutted with conformity. There is always room for an American original, and in this one’s case, there are buyers as well. He has sold about 400 of his paintings in a little more than a decade and is planning a gallery show now, with new paintings and a return to his puppeteering past with sculptural elements. A stage show is being refined and presented on the fringes of Southern California’s theater scene, a place the art world so far fears to tread.
A look closer at any of his paintings, though, takes the viewer to the roots of White’s art: comics. White’s classic American success story is influenced by that most American of popular art forms. He was the comic artist for his junior high school newspaper. He saw Raw Magazine and moved to New York with no contacts in the city but a desire to be at the cutting edge of cartooning. He calls the composition of his paintings “Pachinko machines for the eyeball,” but the structure, especially with the neat frame that the prefab landscapes of yesteryear afford each picture, is essentially a comic cell.
These framed theatrical spaces deliver their poetic meditations with their phrasing clearly infl uenced by the omnipresent word balloon of comic strip styling. He might be an heir to the pictorial legacy of Magritte, but he points out that the deadpan beauty of the bowler hat is linked as deeply to the everyman foibles of the classic Buster Keaton comedies as it is wedded to art history’s wordy, woven narratives.
The words that Wayne White paints are like the animated characters that have dominated popular consciousness for more than a century. From the Katzenjammer Kids to Crumb’s Keep on Truckin’; from Robert Williams’ Coochie Cootie in Zap Comics to the precursor of Maus in Raw, to Bart Simpson himself, White paints single words, phrases, and sentences as memorable characters, each acting in a one-panel stage production of the comic mind come to life as script on pre-fab scenery. When the flesh becomes word to dwell among us, it is not as an actor or director’s unrestrained id; White privileges the poet as screenwriter for these magical one-act cells. The results are as witty and as wise as any fine art out there, more entertaining than any dry art theory in the schools, are as inspiring and biting as the best street art and look as conceptually classic today as their department store landscapes must have appeared forty or more years ago in the hundred thousand tract homes in which they were hung. If your grandfather’s nicotine-stained scene of an idyllic farm that was thrown in as an extra by the furniture salesman ended up in a thrift store after they settled the estate, Wayne White might have a phrase to turn, twist and nail down in order to ignite our collective memory of an America that was more real on the walls of our living room than words might ever recall.*
This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose issue 19, which is sold out. Get the latest issue of Hi-Fructose in print by subscribing to us here.
Source involved in this report: Read Original Article
