Born 1942 in Merrill, WI
Lives and works in Saukville, WI
Tom Uttech’s work is inspired by wide expanses of unspoiled wilderness in his native Wisconsin and neighboring Quetico Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada. Uttech’s paintings, which take their names from various Ojibwe words and phrases, are fantastic imaginings, often populated with hosts of birds and other animals that traverse the landscape in a flurry of natural diversity.
Image Gallery
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Tom Uttech, Nind Awatchige, 2003, oil on canvas, 112 1/2 x 122 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., New Orleans Museum of Art: Museum Purchase, the James and Maya Brace Fund, 2004.29, © Tom Uttech. Image courtesy New Orleans Museum of Art
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Tom Uttech, Enassamishhinjijweian, 2009, oil on linen, 103 x 112 in., Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, © Tom Uttech. Image courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York. Photo by Steven Watson
Tom Uttech’s monumental paintings resonate with the mystical power of the American wilderness. They are inspired by the artist’s treks through the unspoiled forests of northern Wisconsin and Quetico Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada. In many ways, Uttech could be considered a descendant of nineteenth-century thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who argued for an approach to spirituality that was intimately connected to immersion in nature. His otherworldly paintings are filled with subtle references to the divinity of nature and a belief that sheer beauty can be as spiritually transformative as organized religion or art.
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Tom Uttech, Nin Mamakadendam, 2011–2012, oil on linen, 67 x 73 in., Cordelia Nicholas LLC, Connecticut, © Tom Uttech. Image courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York
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Tom Uttech speaks about his work in the exhibition The Singing and the Silence: Birds in Contemporary Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The exhibition examines mankind's relationship to birds and the natural world through the eyes of twelve major contemporary American artists, including David Beck, Rachel Berwick, Lorna Bieber, Barbara Bosworth, Joann Brennan, Petah Coyne, Walton Ford, Paula McCartney, James Prosek, Laurel Roth Hope, Fred Tomaselli, and Tom Uttech.
I went to Quetico Provincial Park in Canada, in Ontario, probably around 1968 or '69 for the first time, and I was really blown away by the way that it’s as pristine and thick and wonderfully beautiful as it was. It was almost an exaggeration of everything about the north country that I grew up in and loved so much. It was that north country devoid of any imperfections. It’s an area of vast lakes and tangled, complicated, wet woods and so forth that a guy can only get through by going on a canoe or following between lakes’ portages that were established hundreds and hundreds of years ago by the Indians that lived there. It’s almost an indescribably wonderful place and full of exciting, beautiful things and danger, because one little slip and you’re in trouble. So, it’s got the double-edged sword, which is really fun. I have traveled there extensively since then, by myself sometimes, sometimes with one or two people along, sometimes leading whole classes of college students for eight or nine years before they caught on and told me I couldn’t do that anymore and call it an art class. But it’s been a really big part of my life. It has become a metaphor for many aspects of what life is like and the meaning of being a person in this time in history. I don’t look at it as being an escapist experience but as a way to understand the meaning of being here in what has become my home. I feel more at home there than here, and therefore I can think and feel very clearly, so it’s a transcendental experience rather than just a “let’s go fishing” time.
The experience of being in Quetico and being affecting by how it feels to me has been used in the paintings in a way that is a modified experience, where I am drawing the paintings based upon what I remember and what impressed me the most, but I’m not making drawings while I’m there. And I’m not making photographs of the place while I’m there and then coming back and relying on those photographs for specific imagery. The paintings are all entirely fictionally made up, just as a novelist would use descriptions and create the ambiance of a situation in order to set the characters in it and then tell a story that they’ve made up. I see these paintings as being exactly the same kind of process. If I am making images from memory, I’m automatically only remembering the stuff that’s most important to me, and therefore there’s a specificity about them that would not be present if I was trying to deal with everything that’s in a photograph or anything like that. I think it’s rather important to the characteristics of how these paintings look.
They are a way that I can, with license, use an image as sort of a metaphor for the fecundity of life. If you go to a place where there are real concentrations of birds or other animals, such as Horicon National Wildlife Refuge here in Wisconsin, you realize that these paintings are really quite empty compared to what can be present. But there’s just no point in painting that many thousands of things, and so I try very hard to allude to the numbers of things that should be surrounding us in our lives. The exact detail of all these things is very important to me. We think about the vegetation and so forth – well, there’s a difference. The birds are often very detailed and precise, and the animals are detailed and precise, and they’re all things that are appropriate for the northern landscape I like to paint. They should be there; they could be there. The vegetation, I’m sort of forced to refer to in a general way rather than the specific detail of each thing, of each plant and so forth. But I will use photographs to help me understand what a bird’s wings look like in flight or to remember what the exact shape and characteristics of something like, let’s say, an Indian Pipe, is. But I decide how to use them and where to put them and so forth first and then refer to references if I need to.
The titles have become an interesting issue. I look at them as being an element – I started doing them, looking at them as being an element of mystery that would complement the mystery in the paintings. That interest was generated by the fact that there are so many Indian names here in Wisconsin, in the upper Midwest, and probably across the whole country, and everybody’s always wondering what that name means. So, it’s a built-in fascination. And when I was traveling in the woods up there, up in Quetico and so forth, a lot of these places had names that were just about unreadable and unpronounceable. The few of them that I’ve gotten under control, like Windigoostigwan Lake, I’m very proud of. At one point I was painting these paintings that were real, direct, landscape-type paintings and I was thinking, “What do I call this thing,” you know, “Landscape Painting with Lake” or some other such thing. It got to the point where it seemed that would really be boring, and I decided to make them allude to specific things, the way the paintings allude to specific experiences. I started naming them – you know, there’s a painting called “Windigoostigwan Lake” even though it’s not that lake at all. After liking that, and liking that extra mystery, I started scouring my maps of the country and finding other names that looked really interesting and would be mystifyingly difficult to read or understand, and started calling things that. Then I ran out of names on that map and got more maps and finally got US Geological Survey maps of the whole d*** area up there. I was starting to run out of names, and about that time I had become very good friends with a man who’s the director of Indian studies at the university that I was teaching at, and he saw these and thought he could help me. He loaned me a copy of a lexicon that Father Baraga, an early Catholic missionary, created when he was working up in southern Ontario and Minnesota and so forth. This book is about twenty-five pounds heavy and has a million words in it, and I was with that able to find words that looked good and had meaning somehow appropriate to the painting. I started naming paintings out of that book. I have since discovered that all a person has to do now is take that word and put it into Google and the meaning comes up, and here I thought I was hiding that and that nobody would ever find it, but what are you going to do?
The frames have become a major part of the paintings, and they are part of a long derivation. I’m of the generation that grew up with abstract Expressionist paintings being framed either with duct tape or something around the edges and that was it, just to cover the seams, or the staples, or else a simple strip of wood or something that was– I don’t even know why they bothered to put it on there. But that was just the way we all did it, and it just seemed so easy that, you know, you could save a lot of money that way. And in time, I began to realize that there are shortcomings to that, particularly after doing things like looking at Dutch paintings in museums, you know, these intense, black things with all this architectural detail, and finding them to be very beautiful. They added a lot of content and context to the paintings, and I began to be jealous of that and started to remember things like the knotty pine paneling in the old cabins in northern Wisconsin, and how much I enjoyed the look and texture of that stuff and all the nicks and scratches and spilled whiskey and whatever on the walls. I thought it’d be interesting for these kinds of paintings if they had that, you know, a referential product on the outside related to the content on the inside. I simultaneously was of course interested in things like Scandinavian furniture with painting all over, rose mulling and things. I started to find it enjoyable to put some of that stuff on those frames and see what it would look like. It’s become a situation where I can now – it's a terrifying thing, and it’s very difficult, but I do it because I try to make a story on the outside of the painting that somehow complements what’s on the inside and maybe can speak in a different language that I wouldn’t feel comfortable speaking with in the painting. So, it completes the painting, but it’s just absurdly difficult to make one thing out of two separate things. But I think they work even though they’re harder than hard to actually do. I’m pleased with them.
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Tom Uttech's work is inspired by wide expanses of unspoiled wilderness in his native Wisconsin and neighboring Quetico Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada. Uttech's paintings, which take their names from various Ojibwe words and phrases, are fantastic imaginings, often populated with hosts of birds and other animals that traverse the landscape in a flurry of natural diversity.
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.