The Ger­man painter Ger­hard Richter goes back and  forth between pho­to­re­al­ism and com­plete abstrac­tion. In this film we see the artist in his abstract mode, using a giant squeegee to apply and scrape off suc­ces­sive lay­ers of paint.

In 2008 and 2009 the reclu­sive Richter allowed film­mak­er Corin­na Belz into his stu­dio in Cologne to doc­u­ment the cre­ation of a series of large abstract paint­ings. Belz was ini­tial­ly sur­prised by the num­ber of lay­ers Richter used to cre­ate his decep­tive­ly sim­ple-look­ing works. “Some­times,” she said in an inter­view on her web site, “I looked at a paint­ing and thought: It’s good like this. But then came the next step in the process, and what I had per­ceived as a fin­ished pic­ture would be destroyed before my very eyes; just paint­ed over. It’s not easy when your ‘pro­tag­o­nists’ are con­stant­ly dis­ap­pear­ing.”

Even Richter often does­n’t know when one of his abstract paint­ings will be fin­ished. “It’s very sur­pris­ing often,” he told Tate Mod­ern Direc­tor Nicholas Sero­ta in a filmed inter­view last year, before the open­ing of a major ret­ro­spec­tive of his work. “I’m paint­ing again and again every day and so it seems you will nev­er come to an end, it will nev­er become a good paint­ing, and sud­den­ly it’s fin­ished: ‘Oh, good.’ ”

Belz’s film, Ger­hard Richter Paint­ing, was released in 2011 to crit­i­cal acclaim. Ear­li­er this month an abstract paint­ing by the 80-year-old Richter set a record for the most mon­ey ever paid for a work by a liv­ing artist, bring­ing $34.2 mil­lion at Sothe­by’s in Lon­don.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vin­tage Footage of Picas­so and Jack­son Pol­lock Paint­ing … Through Glass

Anselm Kiefer at Work, Cre­at­ing His “World of Ruina­tion”

It reads like Hip­ster 101. Cre­ative mis­fit teen makes a con­scious choice to be a freak, grows up, sticks it to the main­stream, gains acclaim paint­ing fun­ny words and phras­es on ugly thrift store “art”. Except Wayne White, the man respon­si­ble in large part for the look of Pee­Wee’s Play­house and the sub­ject of a recent doc­u­men­tary, Beau­ty is Embar­rass­ing, isn’t much inter­est­ed in mock­ing easy prey. Pity. With those bed­room eyes and that ban­jo, he’d make a great a char­ac­ter on HBO’s Girls (pro­vid­ed, of course, he were thir­ty years younger).

Age has con­ferred a num­ber of lessons that he imparts on the thrift store ride-along above. For instance, those squares with whom less sea­soned artists are so pre­oc­cu­pied don’t give a hoot what the likes of him does or does­n’t do. Also, there’s no prof­it to be had in paint­ing on orig­i­nals. “That would be a com­ment on the artists.” Instead he trawls for repro­duc­tions, which he views as prod­ucts that have had all the pret­ty sucked out of them.

His plea­sure in find­ing a suit­ably unlove­ly Venet­ian scene in an ornate frame is refresh­ing, know­ing that it’s not pow­ered by snide irony. The only irony he acknowl­edges is that the uni­verse has seen fit to let him pros­per as an artist in this econ­o­my. Whether this will prove a last­ing lega­cy remains to be seen, but a few min­utes with Wayne White should be enough to per­ma­nent­ly alter your per­cep­tion of that hideous cov­ered bridge scene on your local Sal­va­tion Army’s wall.

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of The East Vil­lage Inky zine, and author of sev­en books, includ­ing the forth­com­ing graph­ic nov­el, Peanut.