Chattanooga Pulse

Growing up on Atlanta Drive in Hixson in the ’60s, Wayne White tried hard to be a jock. His dad loved sports, and as he tells Todd Oldham in the newly released Wayne White: Maybe Now I’ll Get The Respect I So Richly Deserve, “There was always a football or baseball game going on, and my father bowled all the time. I grew up in a bowling alley…”

But from the beginning, Wayne wanted to draw. Between games with his Little League “Dixie Youth” team (“We had the Confederate battle flag on the patch on our shoulders”), he drew. On drawing pads, on paper bags, on pieces of wood, on rocks. And now, more than 40 years later, he still does.

His journey, though, has taken him from Hixson to Murfreesboro to Lake Placid to Nashville to the East Village in New York to Hollywood. He’s been a short-order cook at IHOP, cartoonist, puppet-maker and puppeteer, printmaker, painter and sculptor. He worked with legendary comics artist and graphic novelist Art Spiegelman, designed all the puppets (“except for Chairy”) on Pee-wee’s Playhouse, did the groundbreaking “Big Time” Peter Gabriel video, and built an entirely new career taking thrift-store art reproductions and painting phrases such as, “But it is/And I am/So they won’t” on top of them.

In the book’s preface, Oldham describes his work, “as if one is viewing an old master from another galaxy.”

At heart, however, Wayne remains a Southern kid from Hixson, TN, where his parents still live. He spent some time talking with The Pulse about his art and the release of the comprehensive retrospective on his career.

The Pulse: How long has it been since you were in Chattanooga?

Wayne White: I left Chattanooga in 1979, but I go back a lot to visit my parents.

TP: Now that you’ve lived so long away from the South, has the Southern imagery in your work become more iconic, as opposed to being based on real memories?

WW:  I still see myself as a Southerner, I still use Southern phrases. The phrases on my paintings are voices of characters that I imagine. Some are me, some are other people, my parents…and a lot of the roadside imagery, like the “See Rock City” signs, is still there.

TP: Your painting “You Didn’t Know What You Were Doing But You Did It And Now Here You Are” [in which a thrift-store still life is layered with Dali-esque drooping letters forming the phrase] seems like a self-referential one?

WW: (laughing) Yes, that’s me talking to myself. I like things you say to yourself. Many of them are universal; they could apply to everyone. If it really strikes a chord with me, so that I mutter it, if it sticks in my head, then it has some depth. They’re like the world’s shortest short stories.

TP: Chattanooga has so many layers of history; it’s almost as though you can feel the ghosts around you.
WW: Yes, it’s like the present is layered on the past. The Cherokee, the Civil War, the TVA…when I was a kid, we’d go to junk stores, antique stores. I was kind of lost in a reverie about the past. Now I recycle old paintings.

TP: I notice that quite a few of the paintings reproduced in the book use seascapes. Is there a significance in that?

WW: No, not really, because I think of the reproductions that I use as an empty stage. I only paint on reproductions. Real paintings have too much human smell, and it would be a “comment” on that artist…in a way, I’m collaborating with the artist who painted the original of the reproduction.

TP: You’ve worked in so many forms and mediums in your life. When you get an idea, does it immediately present itself as one form or another? Or do you have to think that out?

WW: I don’t jump back and forth. I often get into a genre of making paintings, or sculpture for three or four months and make a series of them. I’ve been doing paintings, but I’m working on a big sculpture right now, it’s a giant puppet head of George Jones for a gallery in Houston. I want to keep alive the genres I’ve worked in.

TP: You mention at the end of the Todd Oldham interview that you’d like to do puppet shows again. Were you talking about live or on TV?

WW: Live. I’d like to do them in a gallery or in the back yard…for the George Jones piece, you can peep into his brain and there’s a performance going on in there. I like to have an audience…puppets that begin as sculpture and then it starts to move.

TP: Would you like to see a show of your work here, in your hometown?

WW: Yes! I’d love to have a show at the Hunter. Call them for me, would you?

Wayne White: Maybe Now I’ll Get The Respect I So Richly Deserve
Art by Wayne White; interviewed by Todd Oldham
$65
Ammo Books, 2009