Tom Uttech’s earliest childhood memory is of a warm June day when he was about 3 years old. He is sitting, watching a red-winged blackbird as it flies in front of a hay field. “The land was all green and this bird was pitch-black with red epaulets on wings that are fringed by yellow. The visual stunningness really hit home.”
It’s difficult to believe this fleeting visual image would stick in the mind of a toddler, but this whisper from the past contained everything that would become important to Tom Uttech over the next 57 years.
One of Wisconsin’s better-known painters, Uttech taught in the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee art department for 30 years until reluctantly resigning over a contract dispute in 1998. Over the course of his long career, Uttech has earned national recognition for his neon-hued landscapes that now sell for up to $20,000 each. Carving his own niche in the contemporary art world, he has fused the traditional genre of landscape painting with a more expressionist, visionary style.
“He is one of the major figures in the return of the subject to the realm of myth and allegory,” says John Arthur, a national expert on landscape painting. Describing Uttech’s work as Neil Welliver (the dean of traditional, contemporary landscape painting) on hallucinogens, Arthur notes, “This is where landscape painting started, with the wondrous works of Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Martin Johnson Heade, Albert Pinkham Ryder.”
Few artists can support themselves solely on the sale of their artwork, but for the past 10 years, Uttech has had the enviable position of selling nearly everything he paints through one of his three galleries: Tory Folliard in Milwaukee, Edgewood Orchard in Door County and Schmidt Bingham in New York. Perhaps his success is partially due to his work’s broad audience. “Anyone who likes nature buys his work,” says Folliard. Tom Garver, former director of the Madison Art Center, has written, “These pictures incorporate a dense iconography which is personal to the artist yet understood, on some level, by almost anyone.” That iconography is always infused with a soulful longing for the primordial, the emotional timbre behind any Uttech painting.
Like handwriting, a Uttech painting appears effortless and unalterable, as if the artist couldn’t have painted anything else in any other manner. But actually, the realization of his mature style came only after years of struggle and searching, a combative relationship with the art world and a total retreat from painting. Even today, each completed painting may take months of wrestling with compositional nuance. In Uttech’s terminology, the calm lake is only reached after navigating through gnarled trees, crashing rivers and bug-infested forests.
Uttech lives north of Saukville in an idyllic farmhouse surrounded by a stone wall. In June, the hill beside his home blazes with sand coreopsis, a yellow prairie flower. The hill is so stunning that cars stop to photograph it. Since buying the property 12 years ago, Uttech has slowly been transforming 60 acres of farmland back to native prairie. With his wife, Mary, a graphic designer, and 4-year-old son Gus, he has propagated more than 100 species of native plants, a process that requires clearing, burning, weeding, reseeding, adding ponds and eradicating European plant intruders. The land is indeed like a canvas to Uttech, as he euphorically speaks of the seasonal color changes and identifies autumn’s coppery tall grasses, purple asters and prairie clover. He crushes a handful of yellow coneflower seeds and deeply inhales the scent. “Every night after supper, I come out here and collect seed,” he says. “This is fun. I’d like to do this for a living. The art stuff is hard.”
Uttech’s studio is a remodeled barn with big windows that overlook the hill. No view is without sight of a bird feeder, and Uttech is easily distracted. “That’s really strange,” he says. “Look at that. See that goldfinch on the telephone pole? It has a fledgling. It’s really late for fledglings.” His studio is spacious and comfortable, with a predictable blend of animal skulls and old paintings on the walls and Gus’ favorite play materials – duct tape and cardboard boxes – on the floor.
At 6 foot 5 inches tall, Uttech has the slouchy presence of the lumbering bears that appear in his paintings. His face, however, holds a more steadfast bird alertness and his tufted hair is all finch. He’s an intelligent and well-spoken man, prone to bursts of ironic laughter. Obsessive is the one word he uses repeatedly to describe himself. “I don’t know how to golf, the lawn hardly gets mowed and I don’t know how to have conversations with most people, although I do like the Packers,” says Uttech. His wife agrees: “Tom is easygoing, but he pretty much has four areas of interest: painting, family, birding and prairie propagation. They are all pretty equal. He becomes totally absorbed in whatever he takes on.”
On a recent day, Uttech was feeling pressure to complete paintings for his biannual solo show at Tory Folliard Gallery (through March 10). His New York dealer, Penny Schmidt, had just called to try to get some paintings sent to her. An eight-foot-long unfinished commissioned landscape leaned against the barn wall and an etching for a Wisconsin sesquicentennial project needed to be worked on and sent back to Madison.
Even after more than 30 years of practice, the business of painting doesn’t get any easier, says Uttech. “Painting is not at all pleasant. It’s very, very hard work and it’s frustrating and it really grinds you down. It is not easy because you show yourself so often how bad you are and how little you know.”
He glanced at an easel-size painting near the window. “This has been wrong from the beginning,” he says. “It’s been to New York and back. Now I took out the waterfall, moved the lightning, added all that land, repainted this whole group of trees, added this darker thing here.” He pauses to scrutinize the changes. “This space needs to be more interesting. The trees still need more visual interest and I need to do something with that lynx. I want to make it all, well, more spiritual.”
Another painting is starting to look pretty good, but there’s a lingering starkness to it. “I’ll probably add a couple thousand ducks and hawks and owls and flying squirrels,” says Uttech. And he probably will. His most recent work has been dense with wildlife, teeming with migratory flocks of birds, rivers filled with moose, and squirrels, raccoons and other critters tucked in the bush. The paintings have become about fecundity and the fragile abundance of life in the wilderness, which Uttech frets over. He worries about habitat loss and species bordering on extinction. He seems to actually have a personal need to document that everybody’s alive and well out there, which sometimes means getting up at 2:00 in the morning and driving to a swamp just to hear the call of a yellow rail. He keeps a daily list of birds he sees and sends in reports to the Wisconsin Society of Ornithology that document when birds arrive and leave during migration. He sometimes sees more than 50 species in one day between his house and nearby Harrington Beach. In May, he says, if he works hard, he can sight 150 species. The state record is 208 for one day. “One thing I’m kind of proud of,” he says, “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.”
A little handwritten note taped to his studio wall says, “Just do it.” For Uttech, the Nike slogan is a reminder to put aside thoughts of his land, birds and family and pick up the brush. It means he should keep working no matter how badly the painting is going. He says the foremost important skill an artist must learn is perseverance. “When it’s not going anywhere and it’s fighting back, culture comes crashing down on you,” he says. “All of a sudden, you think it’s all been a fluke and you’re as bad as every professor told you. The only thing that works is that you go through it a lot and you know that it’s coming and you know if you keep working, you’ll solve it.”
It may take Uttech several months to build up enough layers of paint to make the sky glow and the water glisten. When a painting finally coalesces into something right, when it gels, Uttech knows because a passage from his favorite composer, Sibelius, bursts into his head. “It happens every time,” he says, “and then I know I’m on track.”
For as long as he can remember, Uttech has liked birds and art. Growing up in the rural area surrounding Wausau with two sisters and a brother, Uttech says that he announced he wanted to be an artist “when I could barely talk.” He thinks that the vision of the red-winged blackbird “set in place an absolute devotion to beautiful things and to nature and birds – the two parts of my life that I can never remember not being obsessed with.” While he was in grade school, his father, an optometrist, made him an easel as a present, a sign of support even though his parents had no interest in art.
In high school, Uttech found social acceptability on the basketball court and track field. But he continued taking art classes and belonged to the Wausau bird club. On one field trip with the club, he visited Frances and Frederick Hamerstrom, the world-famous ornithologists who saved the prairie chicken from extinction in central Wisconsin. They lived in a ramshackle Civil War-era house in the woods without plumbing or other modern conveniences. Orphaned hawks, owls and an occasional flying squirrel often perched on the backs of guests’ chairs during dinner. Uttech says that coming from a “strict, clean, religious household” and then walking into the Hamerstrom’s and seeing their incredible devotion to science was eye-opening. “It was a pivotal point in my life, a lesson to be learned,” he says. “That you could be that dedicated.”
Toward the end of high school, Uttech decided to become either an artist or an ornith-ologist. He didn’t like Latin (a science requirement then), so art won out. He moved to Milwaukee in 1961 to attend the former Layton School of Art. Abstract expressionism was the reigning movement, with pop art only beginning to make a dent. Uttech’s primary painting teacher was Guido Brink.
Brink remembers him well. “I always thought that Tom was really creative and innovative in his search for expression,” recalls Brink. “He had some extra ideas – these painterly idiosyncrasies.”
Throughout his undergraduate education, Uttech remained interested in figurative work, but it wasn’t until he was home for the summer between his junior and senior years that something clicked. A girlfriend had introduced him to the music of the Finnish composer Sibelius, who based some of his music on a Finnish book of mythology called the Kalevala. The music’s epic sweep, mysterious tonalities and ability to darkly orchestrate the forces of nature hit a deep chord in Uttech.
Working in his parents’ garage, Uttech labored all summer on a painting of himself standing with Sibelius and a forest god. When he returned to school, he entered it in an art competition and won first prize, along with a painting by John Colt, a well-known Wisconsin painter who died last year. “During that excruciating repainting and developing, I figured out the way I wanted to see things,” he says. He spent his senior year doing figurative scenes of men in the woods with mythical creatures. The paintings were dark, moody and brooding, à la Sibelius. They all later burned in an apartment fire.
In graduate school at the University of Cincinnati, Uttech says his work “went to hell.” “There was a major disrespect for the landscape stuff there. Zero interest. It was totally out of fashion.” Pop art influences began to enter his paintings – superheroes, Marvel comic book stuff, a flatter, hard-edged painting style and the accouterments of 1960s psychedelia. “I got to the point where my work continued to regress and became totally alien to me,” he says, nodding toward a souvenir from those days on his studio wall: a deer head covered with pink fake fur with plastic gemstone eyes. “What a totally awful screwed-up program,” he still mutters with disgust.
As Uttech flashes through slides from this period, his search for a style is obvious. One painting looks like the Beatles “Sgt. Pepper” album cover. Another depicts a wolf with legs that turn into glowing neon bulbs. No matter how far he drifted, however, there always remained some connection to nature.
These “optically unpleasant” psychedelic paintings landed him his first teaching job. “I was hired by the School of Art and Drama of the Arkansas Art Center because almost everybody down there was on drugs and they saw my paintings and thought I was, too,” he says. Uttech was only in Arkansas for one year before the governor shut down the school because of a scandalous theater department production about the state’s prison system. While there, however, he married a Layton School classmate, Bonnie Haubenschield, who was 18. Uttech was 22 and the couple soon had their first of two daughters.
The 1960s were not a congenial time for painters. Pop art and minimalism rebelled against the gestural indulgences of abstract expressionism. “It was not permitted,” says Uttech. “You could not paint.” Uttech kept at it for a while, but his paintings had drifted into such a conglomeration of art world influences that he felt increasingly estranged from his own work. Now teaching at UWM, Uttech woke up one day and 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, and I gave up,” he recalls. His last painting was of an imprisoned figure seated on a throne, hooked up to toggle switches, with an oxygen mask over his face. The ground at his feet was in flames.
Nineteenth century French writer Baudelaire describes the human need to get away or free oneself from the press of culture as gout du gouffre – a taste for the abyss. During the period when Uttech had quit painting, his marriage was also deteriorating. Faced with adversity, he did what any good naturalist might do – he followed his migratory instincts. It was the late 1960s when he first arrived at Quetico Provincial Park, a vast wilderness in Ontario. He knew instantly that “this was home. This was where my spirit resides.”
His first solo trips were extremely challenging. One time, the black flies were so bad that the bites caused his eyes to swell shut and he had to hole up in his tent for two days until he could see again. He also had to learn to stay calm while being stranded on a lake in a canoe during fierce thunderstorms. The most difficult challenge, however, was simply learning to be alone and self-reliant in an unpredictable environment.
These nature experiences metaphorically paralleled Uttech’s need to retreat from the art world until his own vision cleared. One friend, Dick Wenninger, a mechanical contractor, recalls that in Quetico, Uttech would teach him to “walk like an Indian.” “You close your eyes,” Wenninger says, “and feel your way through the dark just using your senses. I’ve gotten pretty good at it.”
Uttech describes his trips to Quetico as “a real coming to terms with your own self. 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.”
It took a surprisingly long time for the Quetico vistas to seep into Uttech’s paintings. For several restless years, he didn’t paint at all. “I enjoyed teaching,” he says, “and after work, I would go home and play with Sonja. I watched a lot of ‘Sesame Street.’ ”
At night, he would retreat to his office at UWM and covertly make watercolor paintings he never showed to anyone. There was a big abandoned canvas in his office and late one night, he started drawing on it. He painted it in a week and says it just “hit.” The painting is of a night sky with strange floating tree trunks encrusted with lichen and moss and a biomorphic woman/deer figure. What “hit” for Uttech was his return to the landscape. Strains of Sibelius re-entered his work.
The art world quickly responded to this edgy combination of moody landscape and surrealist drama. There was something both Day-Glo hip and soulfully plaintive about these paintings. It was as if Uttech were straddling two worlds – the primordial abyss and the disco morass of the 1970s. Curator Verna Curtis wrote of these paintings: “Deep philosophical concerns about masculinity vs. femininity and life vs. death are open to question here.” Uttech was included in the Whitney Biennial of 1976, an incredible national honor. He had arrived, but he maintained a safe distance from the art world. He now reflects: “I enjoyed the success. It was a kick, but it also wasn’t important to me. I learned, though, that you don’t get something until you give up trying to please others. I had to go back to myself.”
The paintings from this period are much more mythical and gothic than his current work. Sources as divergent as Frida Kahlo and Charles Burchfield creep in. Uttech’s semi-hostile attitude toward the art world appears in the confrontational gaze of the deer/woman as she stares out of the landscape at the viewer as if to say, “You can’t reach me here. This territory is mine. Ha, ha.”
After about five years, these biomorphic woman/creature/landscape paintings began to run their course. “…I was packing so much stuff into them they were almost in antagonistic rebellion against the minimalists.” Just as he was beginning to “burn out,” a friend’s daughter asked him to do a straight painting of a Canadian landscape. The woman was the daughter of the Quetico outfitter, Roger Theu, with whom Uttech had become good friends. “I did this painting,” Uttech remembers, “and it was rather simple compared to what I had been doing. I did it in what felt like two hours after having been working for a whole year on a single painting. It was like, ‘Oh, of course, this is what I’m supposed to be doing.’ ” It was like going to Canada for the first time, Uttech says. It felt like home.
From then on, Uttech has just painted the landscape, ignoring the fact that the art world considers it an unworthy subject. “Who are these turds telling me what I’m supposed to be doing,” he says with characteristic aplomb. And his painting process has remained the same: “I sit down, stare at the blank canvas and start to draw a place where I’d like to be.”
The UWM Fine Arts building is the antithesis of that place Uttech wants to be. The halls are dim and narrow and the air is stale. Uttech calls it an “evil, awful place.” “It felt claustrophobic and stifling, but they have done some remodeling,…” he says. He spent 30 years there, sharing his mantra with students: “Go where your soul is. Do not follow art world trends.”
In the lecture hall, when Uttech would dim the lights, often the projected slide would be Leonardo da Vinci’s “Annunciation.” His obsessive streak seized this image. By the end of his career at UWM, Uttech’s dissection of this painting was three hours long. He believed it held nearly everything a student needed to know about composition. A former student, Brett Angell, remembers it well. “I really dislike that painting at this point,” he says.
Uttech smiles when the topic comes up. “I have learned so much from that painting,” he says. “There’s something about the design that’s not visible on the surface but is always entwined with the content. And it’s that design that determines how the painting feels emotionally. It took years to find everything.”
Another student recalls a graduate seminar with Uttech where the class met once a week for breakfast at different cafes and just talked. There was no agenda. “It was a waste of time,” she says, “totally unstructured.” “Oh,” says Uttech, “that was an idea I had based on the abstract expressionist painters from the 1940s who met at the Cedar Bar in New York.… I’ve always felt that conversation between student and faculty within the university confines was utterly restricting. The university made everything hierarchical. I wanted to set up a class without a structure… to guide them but not have them follow blindly.”
Overwhelmingly, however, what students remember about Uttech is that he set an example. “I learned from the way he worked on his own paintings, which are very designed and specific, very much about planning and order,” says Angell, who now lives in Massachusetts. “He was one of the few professors who could set an example of what you needed to do to make it.” Milwaukee realist painter David Lenz agrees: “No other artist I knew worked as hard as he did.”
Uttech had an unusual arrangement at UWM where he only taught one class but retained the benefits of a full professorship. He was paid just for the one class, however. This allowed him to paint eight hours most days, spend his mornings home with his son and still teach.
When the university wanted him to increase his teaching load, it would have interfered with his time with Gus. It had been a long and strenuous decision to father another child at age 52 with his second wife, but once the decision was made, he was a committed participant. “He does not take on projects haphazardly,” says Mary.
Unable to compromise, Uttech felt forced to quit the art department a few years shy of retirement and a decent benefits package. He remains bitter about it. “I loved teaching,” says Uttech. “I felt I was born to do it, although I pretty much disliked everything else associated with it, like university politics, meetings and that building.”
Yet, says Mary, “He’s happier now. It hasn’t changed our lives at all. The only difference is that he doesn’t need clean pants on Tuesdays and Thursdays anymore.”
One of the things Uttech seemed to enjoy most about teaching was the students themselves. For years, he took groups of young artists on summer workshop trips to Quetico. Lenz recalls camping on a little island and waking each morning to the sound of a moose crunching around in a nearby swamp. Lenz says Uttech would sit on a rock by the lake and critique his paintings. “Honest” is the word Lenz and other former students use to describe Uttech’s critique style. “I remember one time,” says former student Ilze Holzer, “he came in and just said, ‘This work is so good, but your design is absolutely retarded.’ I wasn’t paying him to stroke me, so I really appreciated his honesty.” Another former student, Milwaukee painter Fred Stonehouse, says that one of the most memorable moments of his art education was a critique where Uttech was able to delve beneath a very active, lively paint surface and notice how actually calm and stable Stonehouse’s composition was. “I think to this day,” Stonehouse says, “my work tends to be that way. They are very calm and organized even though they may be about all kinds of anguish.”
Stonehouse also remembers Uttech walking into the studio of one student whose work utilized images from homoerotic comic books. “He took one look at the guy’s work and said, ‘There’s no place for this in the art world.’ ” The student dropped the class the next day. In general, Stonehouse says he kept taking classes from Uttech because “he was the one person I could talk to and I liked what he did as an artist.”
Back in his studio, Uttech eyes another painting that he must finish for his show. “This one,” he says, “is about birding. It’s about sitting in a sedge marsh in April and feeling a vastness and peacefulness in this place in the night.” Uttech struggles to define exactly what it feels like to be alone in the woods and how that sensation transpires in his paintings. His New York dealer describes what Uttech does as “translating an experience more than freezing a landscape or location. They have the mystical quality of yearning to go back into nature, that sense of incredible peace. To me, they have a deep strain of rhythm and lyrical movement.”
Uttech calls me one day to say that maybe he has some more insight on what this all means to him. “I was driving home from Tomahawk and I kept seeing things in the landscape that would create a very strong feeling, like an aching, a yearning or longing for something, but I didn’t know what. But what I think I’m yearning for is to be the thing, to stop being myself in this body and stop being aware of my life and just be that thing… the tree, the landscape, all of it. That’s why I paint the stuff. When I’m painting it, I can actually be it, because it’s my own product. I think that’s the closest I’ll ever come in my life to being that place.”
