After 25 years as artist, cartoonist and Pee-wee’s Playhouse puppet master, Wayne White returns to Middle Tennessee

"We did it for adults," says White, who designed and portrayed puppet characters such as jazzbo pup Dirty Dog and high-flying Mr. Kite. (He also enlisted his friend Alison Mork, who became the show's beloved Chairy.) "It was sort of the kick-off of postmodern programming like that, if you want to give it a label.

"But I prefer to think it was a generational thing. We were of a generation that had been marinated in kids' TV our whole life. It was a comment and a parody and an homage and a critique and whatever you want to call it on all those weird kiddie shows we all grew up with."

Whatever you want to call it, the show's distinctive look—a riot of German expressionism, cheery kitsch, cubist caricature, MTV clutter and surrealist fiat—made White a hot property as a set designer. For one of the most striking videos of MTV's golden years, Peter Gabriel's "Big Time," White devised an unsettling menagerie of outsized imagery, from talking mountains to the star's own elongated kisser.

After Pee-wee's Playhouse ended in 1991, he worked on a number of children's shows that would not have existed without its trailblazing, among them Shining Time Station, Beakman's World and the Riders in the Sky program. For the video-directing team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, who went on to direct Little Miss Sunshine, White turned the Smashing Pumpkins' "Tonight, Tonight" video into a retro-futurist reverie that anticipated the glam-antiquity look of Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge! by five years.

But his success as a set designer and puppeteer left little room for cartooning or painting. Tiring of Hollywood, White says that in the 1990s he began to learn the basics of oil painting. With that came an interest in historical painting and the big, bold all-American landscapes of the Hudson River Valley school.

However much he tried to work in a vein of deliberate Americana, though, he says the resulting paintings just got weirder and weirder. Picture the bold, homespun directness of a Winslow Homer nostalgia piece ruptured by a somewhat out-of-place element—say, a marauding werewolf.

In an effort to try something different, around the end of the decade, White decided to incorporate text into his paintings. On a whim, instead of painting his own landscape background, he dug into a stash of thrift-store paintings he'd bought to salvage the frames. "What if I just paint the words coming out of that?" he recalls thinking.

This ushered in the most recent phase of White's career, a series of "word paintings" that juxtapose innocuous-looking landscapes with phrases painted in giant block letters, as if the 2001 monolith had materialized in a piece of Holiday Inn motel art. Take the most famous of these, which the Nashville band Lambchop made the cover of their 2000 album Nixon. A boy and girl stand poised at the edge of a mill pond. Only one thing comes between them and the millhouse across the lake: the word "Nixon" in enormous white 3-D letters, reflected in the water and interwoven with tree branches.

First off, it's funny. The size and sheer incongruity of the word turn it into a kind of Dada punchline to a joke never told. (That "millhouse" is as poker-faced as visual puns get.) It's also weirdly compelling. The text adds a mystery and dynamic element that demolishes the sentimentality of the original painting, while adding bold vertical slashes that grab the eye. It's also unsettling. The word comes loaded with political baggage, but the oddity of the setting whisks away its meaning, making it an enigma.

It also provides a subtle yet barbed critique of the ways words have been devalued by their ubiquity in the American cityscape and roadway. Critics frequently invoke the West Coast painter Ed Ruscha and his "liquid word paintings" to describe White's work. But White insists his word paintings have a more prosaic inspiration: the "See Rock City" mottos painted on barn roofs throughout his Chattanooga childhood. What word or concept isn't rendered abstract when you emblazon it across a 30-foot billboard, or plonk it into a rural landscape?

"We're so surrounded by giant words," White says, warming to a caller's suggestion that he uses text the way kids see words before they've fully developed reading-comprehension skills. "Our whole world is landscapes full of giant words. [The words in the paintings] stand alone as a structure." That the meanings become obscured or tangled adds to their bizarre power, he says.

"That's the hallmark of a compelling image," he explains, "the tension resulting from all these different meanings."

Up next for White is a reunion with Paul Reubens for a live Pee-wee Herman stage show in Los Angeles starting in November. In the meantime, he's still riding the high of the book's publication last May, something he describes as "a gift from the blue." It's the kind of fortunate, well-timed hand-up that has happened throughout a career going on three decades.

"The real important thing in my life has been meeting people in power who will let me do my thing," White says. "Red was one of the first ones, and then Paul Reubens, Peter Gabriel, and most recently Todd Oldham. If you weren't born with power, you've gotta meet people with power, because that's the only way the art is going to get out there."

And maybe now he'll get the respect he so richly deserves.

Email jridley@nashvillescene.com