Wayne White

“My mission is to bring humor into fine art” 

“I want to take this painting idea and see if I can do a puppet version of it. I want to take cartooning and turn it into a set. I want to take a set and turn it back into a painting.”

“Do what you love. It’s going to lead to where you want to go.”
— All three quotes by Wayne White, from the trailer to “Beauty is Embarrasing”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xQsN1zhRUjU#!  

waynewhiteart.com
Link to his monograph by Todd Oldham, on Amazon
Another example of a fluid thinker, like Andrew Byrom, is Wayne White, a puppeteer, art director, illustrator, painter and sculptor. He’s been a production designer (?) for Pee Wee’s Playhouse, and has designed videos for Peter Gabriel and the Smashing Pumpkins. I’m drawn to how he works with type, particularly how easily he works in both two and three dimensions. For example, “The Sound of Cutting Slack” is executed both as a sculpture and a painting.

When White fuses monumental lettering and thrift store painting, he creates a new idea and hence pushes both disciplines further. Sure, his precedents are Ed Ruscha and Jim Shaw, but I don’t think Ruscha embraced the figurative the same way, while Shaw doesn’t share White’s lettering skill. White did this for the 2000 cover of Lambchop’s album, Nixon, as well as in many other paintings of his.

 

 

 

Paula Scher: Map Paintings

Scher combined her love of painting, lettering and maps in these interdisciplinary works that reflect on our information-centered society.

From the Pentagram website:
“In her paintings, Scher renders information and data culled from headlines, maps and diagrams in madcap fields of hand-drawn typography. Obsessive, opinionated and more than a little personal, the maps provide an exuberant portrait of contemporary information in all its complexity and subjectivity. Scher’s new book of her paintings, MAPS, was published last fall and recently went into its second printing.”
http://pentagram.com/en/new/2012/01/paula-schers-maps-exhibition-o.php 

Antartctica, 2011