Wayne Manns, Part 1: The Spaces in Between

Bloomington painter Wayne Manns comes from a musical background. His father was a pianist who played jazz with the young Nancy Wilson and Philly Joe Jones. His parents were both natives of Atlantic City. His mother worked as a telephone operator which stabilized their family. His father worked many clubs and cabarets. Wayne also played piano but was drawn to art.

After working and showing paintings across the globe, Manns moved to Bloomington in 2000 to attend Indiana University’s graduate program in Museum Studies. At IU, Manns was the curator of several exhibits at the Kinsey Institute and the Mathers Museum. He has also had numerous group and solo exhibitions in Europe, South America, and throughout the US. His works are featured at Indiana University's Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center, the permanent collection at the Indiana State Museum, and numerous private and public collections. He has presented paintings to many notables including Bill Clinton, Milt Jackson, and Donald Trump. For more information about originals and reproductions, you may contact the artist through his website, www.waynemanns.com.

As part of the “Artist of the Week” interviews, ReFrame is offering 10% off frame orders for any Wayne Manns original or print.

Who are your influences?

I like everybody. I like Caravaggio. I was just in Ottawa, and I went to the National Gallery. I was just taken by Caravaggio, and I love him. I love Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh, Munch. Kees van Dongen is one my absolute favorite painters.

I love Gaugin. Gaugin gave me my palette, I think. He gave me the palette that let me paint people of color. When he went to Tahiti, he was painting these people. He would take cadmium orange and sap green and come up with these wonderful browns. Sometimes cadmium orange with ultramarine or cobalt blue. I think I learned my line from Matisse. I look at Matisse for real economy of line. Lines are usually hard and sort of cold. I love to draw, but I really like color. I think I'm a colorist more than anything. I like concentrating more on form and color.

I look at space, the space in between the lines. I'm aware of the space between figures. My father was a piano player, a jazz pianist. And I play piano. And my father told me in music, “Don't worry about all the notes, worry about the space in between the notes.” I try to use the same philosophy in art. I try to look at the space between figures, between objects. I think you can clutter a painting up with a lot of stuff. I love the spaces in between, they're very important to me. Not cluttering the space up, letting it breathe so you can focus on the figure. I am a figurative painter, and I want you to look at my figures. I don't want you to get caught up in the props in the painting.

Could you tell me a bit more about why you tend to paint groups of people?

People don't exist, really, by themselves. I think it's important to show groups of people because people socialize, people like to engage and interact with each other. Especially black people. Black people like to get dressed up and go out, and they like to put on their Sunday best even if it's Tuesday or Monday, then go out and chop it up, have a good time. People when they're together, they tell stories. I don't necessarily have to fill in all the lines. When you have a person by themselves, that tells a story, but you have to fill in a lot of stuff. If you have a dancer, you've got to have a stage or have the dancer performing. But when there's groups of people, the position of their bodies – I call it lingua de corpa – the language of the body – the bodies will tell the story. Just the way the body is positioned, the movement of it, the lifting of an arm – these things all tell stories. For a long time, I didn't feel like I wanted to paint anything but just these bodies. Painting groups lets me complete a story without having to fill in all this extra stuff.

Painting itself is totally, totally, totally the antithesis of what I work on. It's necessary, though. A necessary function, being by myself. There's a lot of solitary time, just working stuff out by myself. It's challenging. It all falls on me.

You're a busy painter. What drives you to produce the work now?

I've got to stay busy. I've got to work. I don't know when my time is up. I want to leave a legacy, for my family, just for myself maybe. I want to leave a body of work. I've met with some successes recently, and that's a nice shot in the arm. I used to think I was invincible, I really did. That's why I did drugs and did crazy stuff. I thought I would live forever. That's the way we lived in the turbulent sixties. There was all this identity stuff I was wrangling with, coming from kind of mixed bag upbringing.

Even though both my parents were black, materially, my mother looks white. That was kind of a challenge. To be the light-skinned family in this black neighborhood we grew up in. But we had a piano, and that was the center of activity because my dad played, and I played. And that was where the whole neighborhood kind of converged on. I saw the attention my dad would get playing the piano. He'd take me around to his rehersals and I said, “I'm gonna learn how to play that piano. This has got some drawing power. I'm gonna learn how to do this thing.” I think people coming together has been a part of my whole life.

What role does race play in your work?

Oh my God. It's all about race. I think when you grow up and you're colored, negro, black, African-American – whatever we are at a particular time – I think that I have an obligation to at least explore some things dealing with the black experience. I think that black imagery is really important for America to have in places everywhere – museums, universities, and such. The more that's out there, it's going to give more young people the idea that they can become the president, they can be the corporate head, that they can be painted – someone can paint them. When I was growing up, I never saw black images in schools or anywhere. There were no black images anywhere. We had two magazines, Ebony and Jet. Now there's all these different magazines, but there only used to be Ebony and Jet.

I think it's important for blacks, but also for whites, to see black images. It's real important for us to know that America is a great place because we went down this road, and we've gone through a lot of stuff as a people together, and separately, we had different challenges but we came through. We've got a long way to go, it's not all over with, even with Barack in the White House. There's still a lot of things that need to be done, when you look at the numbers for blacks in prison, unemployment, mortality, economy. I'd like to see more images in museums. I'd like to see more black women represented.

When you look at my work, the people that I'm focusing on are people of color. I sort of identify with the way that we wear our hats, the way we walk, the way we sort of cock our heads – it's my jazz upbringing. Men with hats and caps and stuff like that. You didn't go anywhere unless you had a hat on. Now it's the opposite. And jeans? You wouldn't be caught dead in jeans. Jeans? Nowadays, every article of clothing I have has paint on it somewhere.

Any advice for our readers?

You gotta find your own way in life. You've got to write your own rules. If you don't, someone else is defining what you do. How could they know who you are, what you do from the time you get up to the time you go to bed?

Come back next week, dear readers, for a very personal discussion of Wayne's beginnings as an artist in Part 2 of ReFrame's interview with Wayne Manns.