WAYNE WHITE

One of my favorite interviews this year was with Los Angeles-based artist Wayne White. Originally from Tennessee and still possessing the kind and easy-going nature inherent in most of "us" Southerners (without the institutionalized racism and neo-conservatism, of course), Wayne welcomed me into his home to talk all things art, music and Pee Wee Herman. It just so happens that Wayne was the puppet designer for the television show and even performed the voices for some of the characters. You remember Randy? Well, that was him.

Besides being a talented artist and having a successful career in Hollywood - he was the art director for seminal music videos Tonight, Tonight by the Smashing Pumpkins and Big Time by Peter Gabriel - Wayne is a perfect host. He took me for a tour of his house (which he referred to as "what Pee Wee bought"), a survey of his backyard, and in the end, even played me a few bars on his mandolin. We drank espressos in his studio and I pretty much took the afternoon off and never returned to the office. It was a pleasure to meet him, and a pleasure to discover his art.

Below is an excerpt from the interview that was published in Filter magazine. You can read the whole story here.

When did you first begin doing word paintings?

Probably in late 1999. I was doing realistic history paintings that were influenced by the Hudson River Valley School of painters, Winslow Homer, and 19th century American Realism. I was buying up thrift-store paintings for their frames, and I wasn’t really using any because they were so screwed up. One day, I decided I was going to paint some letters in one of my 19th century landscapes that I was painting, and I saw the frame and thought I would take the image out. But then I thought, “What if I skipped all my fancy landscape painting and just used this readymade image instead?” So it began—just a spontaneous experiment.

Are there any other specific criteria that the landscape paintings have to meet before you use them?

Well, they’re all lithos. That’s another thing; I don’t paint on the original. There’s too much human smell on the original and that would be a statement about the artists if I painted on the original, because that would obliterate forever the unique thing. I’m just painting on this mass commodity, and because of that, it’s been sort of drained of meaning and become empty, ready to be filled up again.

What comes first, the picture or the words?

The words always come first. I keep a notebook of phrases and ideas. Then, the only connection the words have with a particular painting is if it just fits or not. It’s a purely practical decision. I don’t want it to have any hidden meanings…I let that kind of accrue on its own. I think that’s how all the best art works. The artist is just a humble soldier, putting all this together and the meaning comes if you’ve done it honestly enough. You can’t sit there and pour meaning into it like a recipe. So, there are a lot of associations that happen after I do them and that’s why I like them, that’s what keeps it alive and fresh for me. I start to see the connections that I would never have cleverly done on my own, so I use accidents and juxtapositions constantly. The whole origin of these word paintings was a spontaneous gesture, so I try to stay open to spontaneity.

For more on Wayne White, check out his site.