An Interview With Gary Panter

You’ll excuse me for a moment if this post seems a bit gushy. In my last year of attendance at the School of Visual Arts I was lucky enough to have a class taught by Gary Panter — perhaps best known for designing the sets for PeeWee’s Playhouse — and it remains one of the stand-out classes of my entire tenure in art school. The course was a typical, vague art school course, the purpose of which was ostensibly to help one compile a portfolio but which was really just three hours of conversation and drawing and Gary was probably the perfect person to teach such a class.

Each class would start out with 45 minutes or so of Gary just meandering his way through a lecture of sorts about his career and art in general and the rest of the time he would sit up front and let us do our thing. You could bring your work up to discuss with him or sometimes he would just roam around the room, stopping to talk to the students.

This all sounds pretty standard, on the face of it, but Gary had one, particular trait that made the class work as well as it did: unequivocal enthusiasm. Gary just loved art. He loved making it and he loved to see other people make it and it always seemed to me, that as long as someone was being an artist, Gary Panter would be a happy man, which in many ways was what kids who were going to be thrust into a cutthroat art world needed; someone to remind them that they should always enjoy themselves.

Vice has a five part interview with Panter meandering in his hippie tinged drawl about his career on VBS.TV. Part one is above; hit the jump for part two and a link to the last three.

ART TALK! - GARY PANTER [VBS.TV] : Juxtapoz