WAYNE'S WORLD

The first thing to say about the documentary Beauty is Embarrassing is that it’s a profile of an artist. The second thing to say, hastily, is that it’s not boring or effete, even if you’re not a gallery rat.

This is also true of its subject: Wayne White, a southern-born, L.A.-based eclecticist. White gained prominence as a set designer, puppet-maker and puppet performer on children’s TV shows, notably the classic Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. He’s also been a music-video art director—Smashing Pumpkins' “Tonight, Tonight” and Peter Gabriel’s “Big Time”—an animator, a cartoonist, a musician (banjo) and a painter. His signature works are “word paintings”—ambiguous phrases, often peppered with the f-word, spread grandly across conventional landscapes White buys at thrift shops.

The movie’s title is an example of the sentences or sentence-fragments in these paintings, others include “HOT SHOTS AND KNOW-IT-ALLS” and “FELL 37 MILES TO EARTH 100 YEARS AGO” and “HID IT IN THE WOODS” and “THAT SHIT WAS DEEP” and “ENOUGH HAIR ON MY ASS TO WEAVE A NAVAJO BLANKET” and simply “FANFUCKINTASTIC.” Something about the epic treatment that White gives these elliptical scraps of sarcasm makes them both funny and resonant; he’s like a cranky, foul-mouthed, cracker Warhol.

What makes him—and the movie—lovable is the sense of a passionate aesthetic drive blended with a detestation of aesthetic pretention: an intense, unfashionable belief in the value of art as entertainment. Directed by Neil Berkely, the movie just chronicles the shaggy-bearded, sheepish White’s inummerable strange projects and seemingly pleasant, stable family life. Berkely has no pressing agenda apart from bringing his subject to our attention—the movie seems to be saying “This guy exists, and this is how he lives. Isn’t it cool?” Indeed it is.

Beauty is Embarrassing plays here in Phoenix through Wednesday at FilmBar. It’s also available now on Video-On-Demand.