TOM UTTECH: My paintings, which are now using birds as principle imagery frequently, grew out of an absolute lifetime fascination with birds. Something occurred very early in life before I was more than three years old. A red-winged blackbird flew by in display in front of this perfect, June-green background, and I think that since then my interest was just set in stone. At some point, I discovered Quetico Provincial Park in Ontario. The animal occupants of the paintings are ones that could occur in that place.
Some of them are things I have intimate relationships with, and some are things I wish I had, and some are ones I never even saw. The history of the paintings is a very prosaic, dumb thing, which demonstrates the value of goofing up and failing. Having a painting that was just as dumb as could be, and I could not make it interesting, so I had to do something to that painting to make it interesting. I decided to add animals or birds to it and kept adding more and more, which made it more and more interesting, and it turned out to be very popular and successful. I have sort of been set adrift on that path since then.
I don't know why they all fly or run in the same direction. That was a coincidence, and it feels so right that I just keep doing it. Now, I was making paintings that are fictional—completely. They're not descriptions of any actual place or any actual time or event.
Since the paintings were all fictional, I gave them fictional names, too, like "Portage to Cache Lake" or something. Well, Cache Lake exists, and you can portage to it, but that's not what the painting was about, but it still was an interesting sounding title.
In the parts of making those titles, I started using the names of the lakes that I had traveled on. Before too long, I ran out of lakes that I had traveled on, so I didn't want to say it again. I started buying U.S. geological survey maps of all over the place, and I scoured them for names of lakes. I finally got to the point where I used those up.
Well, I became good friends with a fellow professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who headed the Indian Studies Department. That guy had a copy of a book, which was a lexicon of the Ojibwe language—Oijibwe to English and English to Oijibwe—created in the 1500s. Now, what I'm able to do—and I still use this—I can either think of something that I want the painting to be about in English and then find an Ojibwe translation, or else I could go to the Ojibwe section and look for a word that looks beautiful. Sounds right, as well as I can pronounce it, and if its meaning is in some way or other connected to what's in the painting, then that painting becomes "Wendiguskiwe" or something like that.
I intend this to be an additional element of interest and mystery in the paintings and also a nod of appreciation to those people who I know up there that I like so much.
