Out of the Doghouse : William Wegman has been painting and taking photos of, gasp, <i> people. </i> But he always finds a way back to his Weimaraners

William Wegman is performing in the time-honored tradition of the fine artist--he is earning a living making commissioned portraits of the well-heeled and aesthetically adventurous.

At the Linda Cathcart Gallery in Santa Monica, he set up a makeshift studio for the week before Thanksgiving. He imported most of the operation from New York City, where he lives. An elephantine camera with black bellows looks like an artifact of the 19th Century but produces 20-by-24-inch Polaroid prints in 60 seconds. There are rolls of colored backdrop paper, lights and a table heaped high with props selected from the Salvation Army. Amid the friendly chaos of assistants and friends, Wegman presides with a distracted if amiable air.

Wegman is infamous as the artist who photographs his dog. He may not have aspired to this particular niche in art history but life has its own agenda. In fairness, Wegman has revealed more love, spirit and humor in the photographs of his Weimaraner, Man Ray, than many a lesser artist has done with gallons of paint on canvas. After Man Ray died in 1981, Wegman thought it was the end of the dog photographs. Many in the art community wondered if it was the end of Wegman’s art. After two years of mourning, Wegman got a Weimaraner puppy, only to have it stolen after a few weeks. Never again, he vowed.

But in 1986 he succumbed to the entreaties of a fan who breeds Weimaraners and picked a puppy from a recent litter. That was Fay Ray, who has since grown up and had a litter of her own. Wegman kept the one he calls Bettina. The girl dogs are now the subjects of Wegman’s photographs. The Cathcart gallery is exhibiting photographs of all three dogs ranging from puppyhood to old age through Dec. 24.

Wegman is in L.A., however, to photograph people. This is much more difficult, he assures me. He has done the commissioned portraits “now and then” since 1984.

“I have a lot of overhead,” he confesses. He has a studio in Manhattan, a lodge in Maine and a house in Ghent, in Upstate New York, not to mention the sizable bills for kibble. “I figure I have two options,” Wegman jokes. “It’s this or sell Fay to Purina.”

The portraits of people cost in the low five figures, and Wegman had half a dozen clients here. A sitter receives three prints. Wegman says he began by doing random editorial work for magazines--photographing celebrities like Mick Jagger, Steve Martin, and, notably, first dog Millie with Barbara Bush--as a way to learn non-Polaroid photography.

“I’m not trained as a photographer,” he explains. “I wanted to figure out what my assistant was doing in order to do it myself. Now I know. But I’m pretty much addicted to assistants.” He nods at John Reuter from the Polaroid Studio in New York and other minions adjusting lights and props for the next sitter.

At 49, Wegman has a boyish air accentuated by uncombed brown hair and rumpled jeans and T-shirt. His brown eyes turn down at the edges and seem a little sad, occasionally bemused. He sort of looks like a dog, though not so sleek as a Weimaraner. He elaborates on the pressure of photographing people rather than dogs.

“The exciting thing is you don’t know what you’re going to do till someone is there,” he says. “With the dogs, I know what it’s going to look like. With people, there are so many things that can go wrong. (A sitter) can look stupid or mean. We are dealing with ego with people. The dogs don’t go up to the pictures and say, ‘Gee, Bill, I look terrible.’ ”

There are other difficulties. He explains, “If I make Fay into a matron, the thing is seeing the dog turned into a Sargent painting. If I use a real woman, that shift is impossible. I have to build a different kind of fantasy, like the illusion that things are floating.”

Wegman is referring to the Polaroids of art collector Laila Twigg-Smith, who has posed for the dozen pictures pinned to the gallery wall. In some, she seems to be levitating in a void of black. “I’m playing a kind of game rather than emphasizing how she looks. I’m not good at making people look good. Other people can do that. My background is to make up games with forms, I guess.

“Photographing people is challenging and scary,” he continues. “I don’t know what I’m going to do and I’m a person with feelings too. So I share in their Angst .”

Wegman uses the Polaroid because he likes to play with the immediate results. While waiting for his next sitter, Wegman scoops up Cathcart’s blond cocker spaniel, Cindy. He poses her on a table with a backdrop of crushed purple velvet. Then he drapes long strands of pearls around Cindy’s neck, transforming the dog into an imperious dowager. The moment is captured by Polaroid. Cathcart is delighted. Wegman looks relieved, clearly wishing that all his jobs were this easy.

Bronya and Andy Galef arrive with shopping bags filled with various changes of clothing. Wegman suggests Andy change into his green gardening pants and a T-shirt. “What’s to be nervous about?” Andy says. “I’m never going to look any better or worse than I do now.” Wegman lets Bronya stay in her striped flannel shirt and oldest sweatpants.

“I’m going to be true to me,” she says. “We are informal people who like to hang out in comfortable clothes. We are interested in children, art, anything that grows--and animals.”

In fact, Andy Galef is a prominent business executive and Bronya is a patron. Both are avid gardeners. But Wegman only hears the word “informal.”

In minutes, he has Andy wearing a straw gardening hat, holding a sculpture of a steel flower in one hand, a teacup in the other. Bronya is given a plastic spray bottle and is draped in an African print cape. They take the absurdity of the tableau in stride.

“Maybe we could use this for the annual report,” Andy quips. “Or the Christmas cards,” retorts Bronya.

Wegman is visiting L.A. with his girlfriend of two years, art dealer Christine Burgin. They are staying with artist Laddie John Dill, his wife and baby in Venice. For Wegman, it is a nostalgic reminder of his history here.

Wegman, a native of Holyoke, attended Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and received his graduate degree in fine art at the University of Illinois at Urbana. He was teaching at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1969 when he realized he had to locate himself in either L.A. or New York. “I came here because of Allen Ruppersberg and Ed Ruscha. There seemed to be a school of work I could relate to.”

He came in 1970 to teach at Cal State Long Beach, and settled down with his first wife, Gayle, and a new Weimaraner puppy. His work quickly came to be noticed--Ruscha was among the first to buy his photographs--and he was included in a show of young, local artists at the L.A. County Museum of Art in 1971. Though his photographs had actually been done in Wisconsin, they were written about as having an L.A. sensibility because of the deadpan humor and cracked sensibility. But Wegman couldn’t find financial stability in L.A. No commercial gallery, no sales and no more teaching job. So he moved to New York in 1972. There he was shown to great success by the Sonnabend Gallery.

Like his conceptual art peers, using video or photography, Wegman often documented everyday activities and domestic objects. This led him eventually to photograph and videotape Man Ray. This early work, especially in video, is classic and still hilarious when shown to classes studying art history today. They lampoon the methodology of the East Coast academy of conceptual and process art. Photography critic Andy Grundberg has said, “It takes the most unredeemed aspect of amateur photography and sticks it in the art world’s face.”

His drawings of this period are as idiosyncratic as those of James Thurber and equally obsessed with relationships between the sexes.

In 1978, he started the series of large-scale Polaroids of Man Ray that have become popular favorites. When Man Ray died, however, those images had nearly eclipsed Wegman’s work in drawing and video. Then, in 1985, Wegman started to paint again. “This is after making a serious denunciation of painting in the ‘60s. But by the time I was in my 40s, I said, ‘Yeah, it’s dead but I feel like doing it, so let’s see.’ ” Or, as he told Artnews magazine, “The Lord told me to start using my God-given talents. I interpreted this to mean painting.”

Wegman denies that he returned to painting so that he might be taken more seriously--in fact, his paintings are as eccentric as his photos. But he acknowledges that he was tired of being known as “the guy who photographs the dog.” In any event, painting became a revitalizing force in his art. An exhibition of recent canvases is at the James Corcoran Gallery in Santa Monica through Jan. 5.

These canvases were inspired in part by a two-year project completing a portfolio style book for Lapis Press, which is owned by artist Sam Francis and publishes beautiful limited edition books of essays and poetry, as well as books by artists. One of Wegman’s 20 books is also on view at the Corcoran gallery.

Titled “Field Guide to North America (and Other Regions),” each book is completely unique, made up of watercolors, collages, paintings, drawings and photographs. Robert Shapazian, editor and overseer of the project, wanted Wegman to create the book using all of his media, except video. The collection of loose pages is boxed and wrapped in a sheet of red and black plaid blanket wool.

Although some photographs are repeated in a few of the edition, the texts, collages and drawings are unique to each copy. With 25% of the edition already sold, the current price is $17,500.

Conceived and executed mostly over the summers at Wegman’s lodge in Rangely, Me., it is a witty melange of summer camp project, Victorian nature album and political manifesto. It is childlike and exuberant. Wegman says that he knew how to draw in perspective at age 4. So the sprightly and spontaneous ink drawings seem to hearken to a less controlled, more innocent yearning.

Written on birch bark in autumnal watercolor, this page is collaged with leaves. The opposite page is a color photograph of two Weimaraners--Fay and Bettina--looking like nymphs caught off guard in the woods. Each volume has a page called “About the Author,” which is fictional.

The book simultaneously emulates and plays with the admonitory tone of 19th-Century educational manuals about nature and society. Though there are warnings about man’s relationship with the planet, it is hard for Wegman to be serious for very long. “If you believe too much, you can’t manipulate things in a carefree manner,” he says. Witness a text written in watercolor: “Man is doing all he can at an alarming speed to destroy the environment. Soon there will be no forest left to forest, no farm left to farm, nothing natural will be left. Nada.”

A reader goes on to a map of the Maine lakes stitched in felt, then a page of hieroglyphic style watercolors outlining possibilities for outdoor activity in Maine. The book is an annal of domestic lore, too, including found collages from the ‘50s and a recipe for “Roast Beaver,” calling for bacon, onions, baking soda--and one beaver.

“I was a real artist as a child,” Wegman said. “This is the first chance I’ve had to work with tacky materials. The furthest thing from fine art is amateur art. I figured there was a way to use those materials without making it kitsch. It’s a lot of what my paintings are about, too, using amateur art ideas.”

Wegman is living his idyllic childhood as an adult. His own tender years seem rather grown up. He remembers his Boy Scout troop as a bunch of juvenile delinquents. “We’d go out and rob things,” he recalls with a laugh. However, he has enduring memories of Rangely, where he has been fly fishing since the age of 16.

“This book affected everything I did this year. It reminded me of my childhood in that it brought me back to being sick and staying home from school to paint at the kitchen table. I’m comfortable working on a table with a lot of stuff around, writing, drawing, painting. That’s something I’ve been doing longer than photographing the dog. This goes back to why I wanted to be an artist.”