Beauty is Embarrassing for Artist Wayne White

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Sunday, 19 August 2012 17:20

Written by Laura Blum

The multi-talented Wayne White is the toast of Neil Berkeley's documentary Beauty is Embarrassing. Ignorance can be embarrassing enough, so for those wondering, Wayne who? there’s this edifying and engaging film.

If you were a fan of the 1986 - 1991 children's television show Pee-wee's Playhouse, for which he did sets, puppets and some voice, you'll thrill to White's artistic Big Adventures. That antic sensibility also enlivened an earlier children's series he worked on, Mrs. Cabobble's Caboose. Through show clips and White's annotation, Beauty gives the artist his long-awaited due as a major maker in Pee-Wee's behind-the-scenes playhouse.

Beyond Pee-Wee's, the film argues the case for his esteemed place in Pop Art. Exhibit A includes evidence ranging from his music videos for Peter Gabriel's "Big Time" and for the Smashing Pumpkins' “Tonight, Tonight” to his word paintings superimposing sarcastic commentary over sentimental landscapes (now commanding serious price tags in the art market).

And that's not counting his ongoing output across illustration, animation, set direction, puppetry, sculpture and even banjo playing.

For years, the Tennesse mountain boy's weirdo ways cost him approval and acceptance, including his own father's. Today White gets the last laugh. And Beauty is Embarrassing will keep him in the yuks for a while yet.

The film opens theatrically on September 7. Snagged for an impromptu chat earlier this year at the Full Frame Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina (April 12-15, 2012) the Emmy recipient mused about his Appalachian roots, cultural heros and irrepressible urge to create.

Q: Nice end credits!

WW: They were my only hands-on contribution to the film. I didn’t even see the finished film until the premiere (at SXSW). I loved it.

Q: What was the first thing that popped to mind when you saw it?

WW: I got very sentimental about my parents.

Q: Your father crying...

WW: That really hit me. I knew it was going to be in there and I was steeling for it. But it really hit me hard. I was very nervous because I wanted to protect my parents. Suddenly they’re thrown into this crazy media world. They’re innocent. I was touched by the gentle and respectful approach to them [in this film]. How (Neil) handled my them, my early years, the car wreck -- that was very well done.

Q: The car wreck happened when you were in third grade. How did it come back to haunt you?

WW: It was pretty upsetting just living through that wreck. I remember the aftermath. That was upsetting. I saw things.

Q: Does it still seep into your art?

WW: Yes.

Q: Did you grow up with religion?

WW: No, my parents weren’t religious at all, so I never even had the impression of religion in the house.

Q: Was that unusual for a Tennessee family?

WW: Yes, very unusual. My parents just didn’t care. They weren’t anti-religious -- they certainly weren’t intellectuals who had formulated an idea of atheism -- they were just indifferent to it. My father grew up in a very Evangelical house and he rejected it early on. He was a rebel too, in his own way.

On my mama’s side they were just crazy wild and didn’t give a shit. They had the money and were a little more sophisticated, but my father was the old-time Baptist thing and he was tired of that. I didn’t have any oppression of religion, but it was all around me at school and preachers knocking on the door. I didn’t have to deal with that, but a lot of my friends did. That was never a point of rebellion for me directly.

Q: Your mother was very artistic, but was anyone else in the family?

WW: I’m a brand new fruit in my family tree.

Q: Did your parents like your artistic side?

WW: No, that was just "something Wayne does." I was never encouraged. Though they didn’t discourage it, they didn’t see the possibilities. Even my teachers.

Q: Except that first grade teacher.

WW: She’s the only teacher that did and she's my angel. Otherwise, all the way through it was just indifference.

Q: What ignites your ideas?

WW: It’s so second nature to me, it’s hard to qualify or be objective about it. I’ve always drawn, I don’t know why. It’s just some biological thing in me. And it was a form of entertainment. There weren't all the forms of distraction kids have today. It was simpler back then.

Q: Did you have access to information about art when you were young?

WW: I started learning about other artists through the Time/Life series The World Of. That’s my first art history education. Our high school library had the whole series and I just pored over them.

Q: Did you ever rip out a page?

WW: I don’t think so. I might have stolen a whole book because I was probably the only one looking at them. But that was my first real self-educated look at art history and other artists. When I got to college they had an even better library. I worked there and spent all my time there going through back issues of old art magazines, every art history and picture book they had. I gave myself a crash course.

Q: Who did you particularly like?

WW: I liked them all, but I liked the impressionist painters a lot. And Robert Crumb, the underground cartoonist was very important to me. I met Robert in California through my wife, Mimi Pond, the cartoonist. He’s a genius artist and underground comics were very important to me in junior high and high school -- the art history references in the drawings, those drawings were rich with the history of graphics.

Q: What role did The New Yorker and Village Voice play in your cultural coming of age?

WW: I read The New Yorker religiously in college because I had this fantasy about being a sophisticated New Yorker and I just loved it. I read a lot. Short stories, novels, non-fiction -- it was a form of entertainment.

Q: Who were some of your favorite writers?

WW: John Schaefer. Frank Norris. McTeague. I love Faulkner. Nicholson Baker. Walter Percy. I love the Southern writers. I love James Agee, his film criticism. I love Flannery O’Connor. Reading is very important to me, I consider myself a writer. Like word paintings.

Q: Have you ever had a dry spell?

WW: Never. As long as I have a pencil or a piece of paper, I will never have a dry spell. I don’t believe in dry spells. As far as art concepts go, I try not to live in the head, it’s all about the physical act of touching and making. It’s all visceral for me. It doesn’t start up here for me.

Even though I like to brag about how much I read, I’m not an intellectual. I can’t form an idea. I believe simple motor activity will motivate you.

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