Photos ©Sarah McEneany
 

It isn’t easy to get to Tom Uttech.  If you call, you’ll probably get a machine.  “You’ve reached the home of Tom Uttech.  I’m out in the barn, doing chores.”  Like me, Tom doesn’t seem to want to answer the phone, nor return a call, so unless you become pesky, he might not call you back.  Even after we talked, it was hard to pin him down to a meeting.  “I’m pretty busy right now.”  Well, actually, I was, too, so neither one of us leaped to make an appointment for an interview.  Months passed.  He forgot to send me material.  I stalled.  I called.  We set one up.
 
The thing about phones is that they’re so mechanical.  And the thing about everything else—like people and art and nature—is that it isn’t.
 
Tom lives outside of Saukville, which is outside of Milwaukee, which is pretty much outside of everything.  An imposing (though whimsical) stone fence stands like a natural fortress at the apron of his land.  He and his wife, Mary, have developed a sixty-acre prairie that further surrounds him.  You’re likely to drive past the property, because except for the fence, it isn’t marked or distinct.  If you find it, and knock on Tom’s door, he isn’t likely to answer, because he isn’t likely to be there.  Like he said, he’s in the barn, doing chores. 

Tom is a tall man, 6 foot 3 inches, soft-spoken and rumpled.  “I’ve become an early riser in the last twenty years.  I take care of Gus in the morning, then run errands or return here.  I do projects outside, planting, harvesting seeds.  Prairie projects.  Or I do birding in the spring.  I pick up Gus after school and drive him to day care.  I gradually make my way home and then begin to paint.  I paint till my face falls into the palette.”

Apitwewedjwan
57" x 61" Oil on anvas

 Tom, 58, has two grown daughters from his first marriage, and two grandchildren.  “My daughters live in the bizarre world of Washington D.C.  They have very small yards.  They’d like to grow things, but where are they going to do it?”  They’re blown away by Tom’s life, and the land around him.  The difference “is like Mars and Earth.  They could move, of course, but you become so tied to the place you are” and it becomes increasingly hard to pull up roots and move.
 
Tom grew up near Wausau, and has lived in Wisconsin nearly his whole life.  He’s the son of an optician father and homemaker mother.  Neither parent attended college, and in fact, his mother only graduated from grade school, “a cultural truth at that time.  It was believed that women didn’t need to know more then.”  Tom speaks of his parents with reverence.
 
Very early in his life, Tom decided to be an artist.  “I can remember in third or fourth grade, that art was the only thing they were doing that had any meaning to me.  My interest in art was absolutely in place by fourth grade.”
 
If art was Tom’s career choice, birding was his early avocation.  At three, he remembers seeing a red-winged blackbird silhouetted against a June hay field.  “The visual stunningness really hit home.  It set in place an absolute devotion to beautiful things and to nature and birds—two parts of my life that I can never remember not being obsessed with.”
 
In high school, he joined the Wausau bird club.  One of the club’s field trips took him to the home of Frances and Frederick Hamerstrom, the world-famous ornithologists.  Their Civil War era house didn’t have modern conveniences, such as plumbing, and they shared it with orphaned flying squirrels, owls and hawks.  This devotion was not lost on Tom, and he considers the visit “a pivotal point in my life.”
 
Now Tom keeps a daily list of the birds he sees and sends reports to the Wisconsin Society of Ornithology.  “One thing I’m kind of proud of,” he said, “is that I’m the second person in the state who has seen over 300 species in a year, more than one time.  I’ve done it three years in a row.”
 
 
In the fickle world of art
 
In 1961, Tom enrolled in the Layton School of Art in Milwaukee.  This began a long period of struggle.  His struggled centered on this: How could he conform to the expectations of the Art World and still be true to the natural life that had imprinted itself on him so early?
 
In college, Tom discovered his style---not through art, but peripherally through the music of Sibelius.  Tom’s girlfriend introduced him to the Finnish composer the summer before his senior year and he fell completely under its spell.  Tom listened to the music over and over.  Sibelius is sweeping and feral, and inspired Tom to paint dark, mythical landscapes.  This was it, the foreshadowing of Tom’s style.  Although it became obscured again, through the cluttering influence of a disconnected art world, it was there, nonetheless.
 
Tom went to graduate school at the University of Cincinnati, and his work “went to hell.”  Young adults are malleable.  What was forming Tom in graduate school was not the natural world he had known, but the world of pop art, superheroes and psychadelia.  In the fickle world of art, landscape was out.  So pink fake fur and plastic gemstone-eyed creatures emerged in Tom’s art.  “I got to the point where my work continued to regress and became totally alien to me.”
 
 
“Art education is a lot about personality.  There’s such vacuous stuff going on.  When art is about itself, it isn’t any good.  Those in the art world keep looking at each other.  What show gets the most recognition?  When you begin to seek that as a goal, your art becomes anemic.  So many in graduate schools are anemic.  Dull, listless.  Derivative.  Vacant.
 
“Usually, the self-designated ‘nonconformists’ in the art world are the most conforming.  Even to what they wear, all in black.  Bodies pierced in the same places.  And it’s all the same work.  You can’t feed on art itself.”  Tom feels it’s better to be fed by an original source, the natural world, the people in it, not somebody else’s interpretation of it.  “What they’re feeding on is nothing.”  Tom’s face washes over with two emotions—disgust and humor.  Tom seems almost naughty, like the boys in sixth grade who liked to crack their knuckles just to see girls squirm.  He enjoys his irreverent humor, and is very aware that I’m enjoying it, too.
 
After graduate school, Tom taught, first at the School of Art and Drama of the Arkansas Art Center, then at UWM.  Tom continued to cram the disparate influences of the popular art world into his work.  If his own center remained, it was deeply obscured.  One day he said, “Just screw it.  I’m not an artist.  If this is what I have to do to be an artist, I’m not going to be an artist.”  He did one last painting: An imprisoned figure with an oxygen mask, hooked up to switches, the ground around him in flames.
 
But then everything changed.  Tom went to Quetico Provincial Park in Ontario, a place he now calls his spiritual home.  Quetico is a vast wilderness area, and he was there alone.  Nature is unpredictable, and sometimes dangerous.  Your own body can betray you.  Your mind can, too.  There’s no supermarket.  No 9-1-1.  No delete button.  “When you’re alone, after a few days, the internal conversations gradually wear out and you are able to really accept the little things happening around you and the spirits of those things.  You can find your own self . . . . You’re out of place with the ordinary and in place with something eternal.  That’s real transcendent, a godly experience.”
 
Still, after he returned, the transcendent experience at Quetico took time to germinate.  There were several more restless years, covert watercolors, and a big, abandoned canvas in his UWM office . . . waiting.  One day he began, feverishly.   It took just a week for Tom to cover the canvas with night sky, lichen, floating tree trunks, moss and a biomorphic deer/woman.  Landscape.  Metaphor.  Story.  Transcendence.
 
This combination—metaphorical, fecund landscape in rich, glowing oils—has become Tom’s fingerprint.

 
“When you can look down to the bottom”
 
Landscape painting is still not in vogue.  “I’ve been marginalized by the art world.”  He says this without rancor, perhaps even with humor.  “I’m probably lucky that I’ve been marginalized.  I am lucky—in a lot of ways.  I sell everything I do.  But I’ll never be in the Museum of Modern Art, or a trendy place.  I’m not one of the people who are discussed.  I’m invisible.  Although, I’m often surprised that people in the art world know who I am, know my work.  That surprises me.”  But Tom considers himself lucky because the art world has no undue expectations of him.  He’s free to do as he pleases, is accountable to no one, doesn’t feel the pressures of being on the cutting edge.  “It takes off any pressure of illusion.  It removes any temptation to conform.”  Tom smiles as he thinks of the “sweet spot” he’s found.

In the beginning of this period, Tom’s paintings weren’t as teeming as the ones you see now.  They were “sterile, vacant, with maybe one animal staring at you.  I became aware that there was the absence of small, moving life forms.  The sky is full of moving things, if you look at it.  My paintings allude to a life that can be there.
 
“Paintings can be a way to show how wonderful things can be.  Maybe it will make people interested in the environment and then grow to love it.  That can lead to knowledge and then concern.  This work is as useful as a direct criticism of polluters.”
 
Tom’s work always contains the four elements of our natural landscape—sky, earth, creatures, water.  “The context has to be there, the sweep of landscape.  But the details have to be persuasive.  Like classical music.  At first, it’s one big rumbling noise, but then you pick out the pieces or strains of music which illuminate and give the whole thing meaning.”
 
Tom claims that there is no season, no time of day, no element of the earth that fascinates him more than any other.  “Dawn and dusk are mystical.  But there are no down times in nature.  No time when a season is too long, because there’s always something happening.”  Still, landscape can be land, creatures and sky.  Water may be optional to a specific landscape, but not to Tom’s.  There is water in every Uttech painting.  Why?
 
“I must really like water.  It’s a really happy place.”  He thought longer.  “Quetico, my spiritual home, has a lot of water.”  He thought longer.  “Water is the most wonderful, beautiful thing in the world.
 
“I love it best on a still day, when you can look down to the bottom.  It’s a brand new, alien world.  Also, water is the most dangerous element.  We breath air, would die in water.  It's the most dangerous thing around us because it cuts off air.  But it’s always magical, like looking into the subconscious.  And then there’s the ridiculous magic of reflections.”
 
There’s this idea Tom has played with, for a children’s book.  He sees someone paddling through the water on a completely still day, toward the other side.  But before he gets there, the boat tips upside down.  Now he’s paddling on the underside of the water.  “Isn’t that a good idea?” he asked.  Tom giggles deliciously as he turns this idea over in his mind.
 
“That world underneath is as real as ours.  It’s telling us things.  That’s the attitude that I want in my paintings.  The world is like ours, but different and dangerous.  That magic is implied by water.
 
“Don’t you love those still evenings when you’re paddling around at a certain speed, and are able to keep in front of your own waves?  If you don’t look up into the real world, you can be transported.  That sense of magic.  It’s like when you’re flying and look down at the clouds and really believe you could walk on them.”

 
“Never Too Cold”
 
Tom works every day.  “Some days I can’t, because of things.  Like now, I’m working on a sesquicentennial project for the State of Wisconsin.  But I try to do something every day so it’s never too cold.”  The thing to do, is to paint every day.  Some projects are very long, others are short, so Tom can always find one to fit the time he has available.  But however long, some work must be done.  “When we’re gone and I come back, my fingers don’t feel the same around the brush.  Especially after canoeing.  My fingers almost feel foreign to the brush.  Maybe it’s because the canoe paddle is thicker, I don’t know.
 
“Painting goes badly almost every day.  There are vastly more mistaken days than good ones.  The hard work part of painting is really present for me.  I’m constantly dealing with the dilemma of not doing what I want to be doing.”  When he’s outside, he feels like he needs to be painting.  When he’s painting, he longs to be outside.
 
What if he gave into it, his longing to be outside?  “I’m afraid I’d just walk away and never come back.  Because I never have a bad day when I’m just looking.”
 
Does he enjoy painting?  “I don’t know.  I don’t think it’s fun, but not doing it would be awful.  When you’re called to do something, it’s irrelevant if it’s fun.  Like breathing.  It’s better than the alternative, isn’t it?  Not-painting is a lot like choking.”
 
How does Tom keep himself from becoming despondent over our declining environment?  “I don’t.  I am despondent.  It’s a fact of life.
 
“People have never been less connected to the natural world.  They’re blithering idiots about how food is grown.  It’s bleak.  They look out the window and as long as things look nice . . . It’s a nice, warm day, that’s all they care about.  Not the problems of global warming.  But you have to live your life.  You have to get along.  And it is really nice to look out the window.”
 
Tom nods toward his own window, the one in the barn.  He’s right.  It really is beautiful out there. The prairie, of course, is organized chaos at its best, squirming with bugs and birds and tunneling critters.  This is early November, and the sun is warm.  The whole autumn has been warm, as last autumn was.  It’s easy to be lulled into a sense of well-being.  There’s the prairie, there’s the sun, and it’s unseasonably warm.  Life is good . . . isn’t it?  The windowsill is full of bugs—mostly flies and this season’s disturbing onslaught of ladybugs.  These ladybugs aren’t native, but Asian intruders.  They were introduced to our country to reduce an aphid population--and like purple loosestrife, starlings, kudzu and glossy buckthorn—they’ve swelled to alarming proportions, unchecked by natural predators.  We both watch now as one of the ladybugs flaps frantically on its stubby wings, dragging a six-inch trail of cobweb.
 
“The role of observer is very critical to us as artists.  Artists are best when we are like servants to the highest ideals of our culture.  Like da Vinci.  The work of sharing the highest values of the culture is not to be dismissed.”
 
“There’s no connection to religion in my paintings, although I’m magnificently aware of something that’s beyond what is here.  I’m in constant awe of it.  I’m trying desperately to reveal what that is in my paintings.”  Tom becomes very animated as he explains.  He talks about several different bugs, each exquisitely designed to perform a specific task.  “When you get into a detailed study of what’s in the world, it’s magic beyond belief.”  If landscape is the context to help us connect ourselves to a spiritual realm, it is the details that are convincing.
 
“If it took God to do all this, the complication and completeness dwarfs anything that’s in the bible.  If my paintings can allude to that, it gives them truth.  That’s what I want.” 

Back to Top

Barbara Joosse is an author of children's books living in Cedarburg, Wisconsin.
To visit her website click here.