“The Pee-Wee Theater wowed everyone,” he told me, “because there was nothing like it on television at the time. We were a bunch of New York weirdos. Everything else on television was done in Los Angeles.” His artistic hero was the master cartoonist R. Crumb, whose influence was combined with German Expressionism and the artistic vocabulary of mid-century cereal and detergent packaging; as a result, Pee-Wee environment design won three Emmy Awards. Wayne, who was also one of the puppeteers, called me out on names and recalled all the sounds he made for the puppets as they interacted with Paul Rebbins, who entertained every kid who grew up in the 1980s. This job led me to work as an art director on a range of children’s television shows, directing Peter Gabriel’s video for Big Time and the Smashing Pumpkins’ Tonight, Tonight. Along the way, he weaves in stories about stalking cartoonist Art Spiegelman so he could audit his classes at the School of Visual Arts, being inspired by a young Matt Groening, recalling Gary Painter’s peak as the king of punk rock comics, and meeting New Wave comics legend Mimi Pond, whom Wayne married and whose work initially brought them to Southern California (Pond wrote the script for the first episode of The Simpsons ).
Of course, what artist’s life story would be complete without donning a giant puppet head of Lyndon Baines Johnson to properly tell the story of America? Wayne White’s studio is not a common sight. As he recalled his journey across America and his brushes with glory, his paintings around his studio suddenly reflected a poetic Americana that might have seemed a little tired, ironic, or insincerely kitsch had any other actors or landscapes been added to his work. But this is a serious undertaking, and White’s writing is spare and poetic, and the tone, shape, and shading of the typeface artistic. The end result is the creation of unique paintings in an art world filled with consistency. There is always room for American originals, and in this case, there are buyers. He has sold around 400 paintings in more than a decade and is now planning a gallery show featuring new paintings and a return to his past puppet shows with sculptural elements. A stage show is being refined and presented on the fringes of Southern California theater, a place where the arts world has hitherto dared not tread.
However, a closer look at any of his paintings leads the viewer to the roots of White’s art: comics. White’s classic American success story is influenced by most American popular art forms. He was a cartoonist for the junior high school newspaper. He moved to New York after seeing Raw magazine and had no connections in the city but a desire to be at the forefront of comics. He calls the composition of his paintings “pinball machines for eyeballs,” but its structure, especially the neat frame that the prefabricated landscape of the past provides for each painting, is essentially a comic cell.
These frame theatrical spaces express their poetic meditations, with phrasing clearly influenced by the ubiquitous word balloons of comic book style. He may be an heir to the legacy of Magritte’s paintings, but he points out that the bowler hat’s deadpan beauty is as closely tied to the foibles of everyman in Buster Keaton’s classic comedy as it is to the long, woven narratives of art history.
Wayne White draws words like the animated characters that have dominated popular consciousness for more than a century. From Katzenjammer Kids to Crumb’s Keep on Truckin’; from Robert Williams’ Coochie Cootie in Zap Comics, to the precursor to Maus on Raw, to Bart Simpson himself, White has transformed single words, phrases and sentences into unforgettable characters, each performed in a single-panel stage production that turns comic minds into scripts on prefabricated sets. When flesh becomes speech and dwells among us, it is no longer the unfettered self of an actor or director; White gives the poet the privilege of being the scriptwriter of these magical one-act plays. The results are as witty and intelligent as any fine art, more interesting than any dry art theory in school, as inspiring and poignant as the best street art, and as conceptually classic today as their department store landscapes must have appeared more than forty years ago in the hundreds of thousands of homes where they were hung. If your grandfather’s idyllic farm scene was tainted with nicotine and tossed into a thrift store as extras by a furniture salesman, Wayne White might have twisted, twisted, and nailed it with a sentence to ignite our collective memory of America while it hung on our living room walls, more authentically than words can ever recall.
This article originally appeared in High Fructose Issue 19, which is now sold out. Subscribe here to get the latest print issue of High Fructose.
