Art studio major Zane White paints imaginative landscapes and people. He's studying Arita porcelain and said UNM is the only place outside of Japan that teaches this style of porcelain. He longs to paint murals and relishes road trips, which are a source of his inspiration. He's the director of the ASUNM Craft Studio, where he works on his pot-throwing skills. You can check out his paintings at Porchmonkey4life.deviantart.com.
Daily Lobo: They say if you're more into landscapes you're more introverted, and if you're more into people then you're extroverted.
Zane White: I could see how that would work psychologically. So I definitely - it's a little bit of a balance, but I think I enjoy doing the landscapes more.
DL: These clouds are amazing.
ZW: I was really happy with those.
DL: Have you studied clouds specifically?
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ZW: This is the first time I did clouds really well.
DL: It's hard to make them look really good. The lighting's so complicated because it's coming from all these places outside.
ZW: Reference photos help. This isn't out of my imagination. That's way too complicated. You just gotta be very light when you paint clouds. You can use Liquin or Gamsol to thin out your paints, and those are a little bit thicker than a glaze, but it's still fairly transparent so you can still see the blue behind them. Then it's just sitting there softly blending the whites into it.
DL: Do you have personal criteria for what makes a good piece of art?
ZW: It's something that's hard to judge. When I see something, I can usually tell pretty quickly whether I think it's a good work of art or not. What makes a good work of art is something that is fairly - it doesn't have to be completely original, but something that comes from your own inspiration. I prefer to see works of art that, that - aren't like, copied totally, like completely realistic renders of life. Even though those are cool too, but it's like -
DL: So you like something with soul to it?
ZW: I like something with soul to it, really. I can definitely deal with something not being so technically tight if it has some soul to it. And then I like art that has either a spiritual or political or philosophical message behind it, because then you can go more in-depth.
DL: How obvious should that message be? Or is it sufficient to have it explained in a paragraph next to the painting?
ZW: You should try to keep away from explaining it in a whole paragraph next to the painting. I think the painting should reveal some of it. It could be anywhere from completely apparent to a little bit disguised. Some of the problems I've had with my work is some of the narratives I've decided to paint are almost inside-joke kind of stories. So nobody gets it besides me and a couple of my friends. So it's very cryptic, and I think if you get too cryptic, it's hard for other people to understand what you're trying to do or be influenced by what you're trying to do.
DL: If you had unlimited resources, is there an art piece you'd want to make? Any big ideas you'd want to see fulfilled?
ZW: I have ideas going around in my head a lot, and not next semester but the semester after, I'll probably be doing my honors thesis for the College of Fine Arts. So I'm going to have to do something like that, and I'm thinking, how am I going to combine ceramics and painting? I used to make these masks, and a lot of them were influenced by Celtic mythology, but I was really into that two or three years ago. There's been a lot of other art history and cultures that have influenced me since then, so I'd like to do a series of masks combining stuff Southwestern, like Chocoan culture, other Native American cultures, Indian, Buddhist and just, like, a whole shrine of masks.. And I don't know if I'll ever get to it, but I'd really like to do murals.
DL: Oh, yeah. Those are fun.
ZW: If I ever have time - outside of the SUB, when you come out of the craft studio, or the movie theater, there's the wall right there. We have authorization to do artwork on that wall. Not the director before me but the director before him - she wanted this whole tile project done with all the sororities and frat houses' symbols on it and her idea was really lame.. That's my responsibility now. So what I'd like to do is do a painting on there. I haven't really worked out any drawings on it. I wanted to get a bunch of artists together and do this because we don't have that much money to pay to do it.
DL: Are there some contemporary artists you're into or that influence you?
ZW: Glenn Brown I like. He'll do almost old-looking Renaissance portraits, but the colors in them - he's very Dali-esque in the way it looks like the person's melting into different colors. But it still looks real tight. Oh, William Kentridge! You should really look that guy up. He's from South Africa. He does these charcoal drawings, but what he does is he'll make a movie. You should really look him up on YouTube instead of Google. He makes movies and he uses 20 sheets of paper for the movies. He'll draw a picture and erase it and draw it back and take the still of each one. It makes an animation and you can see the lines of where he has erased and re-drawn. The real good one to watch is "Felix in Exile."
DL: Do you ever want to do something like this or do you just like to watch it?
ZW: It would be so cool to do it, but part of the reason he's so intriguing to me is he blows my mind how he does it. What blows my mind even more is this is the same piece of paper he's erasing and redrawing on.
DL: It leaves eraser trails and everything.
ZW: He'll turn a dead body into a landscape - it just morphs into a landscape. He lives in South Africa, so he's dealing with the insane amount of racism that's there. It's really dark, but it's really cool at the same time.
