Saturday, February 12, the Historic Third Ward's Tory Folliard Gallery presented the exhibition "Tom Uttech: Boreal Conversations." Uttech displayed approximately two dozen new paintings and prints of his beloved Canadian and Wisconsin Northern landscapes. The following interview continues Uttech's conversations to the crowd that attended his artist's talk on that sunny Saturday afternoon.
How do you approach the beginning process of painting?
From my subconscious I begin with charcoal and let it run around [the canvas, linen or paper] and then structure it into a language that you can understand and be understood. It's like automatic writing and drawing. And then I go back and think about the specific space between objects [in the painting] and this becomes the syntax [for the painting]. This one tree [he points to the painting behind him] may have been moved eight times. There are objects in the painting that come and go until the language you're speaking is encouraging the story you're telling, and then this comes out on the canvas. This is the subconscious story that one tells through the numerical representation, an arrangement of objects, shapes and their placement [in the painting].
How do you work on the actual painting?
When I'm working on the painting I move from background, to foreground, then middle ground, and [keep] moving back and forth. In this one painting I tried to capture the presence of all things in existence, the passenger pigeons, to make people aware they had been there [in the landscape] at one time, speaking to the extinction of things. So I drew the passenger pigeons and woolly mammoths [on the painting in the sky and lake]. Then I paint over them so that it will be like a hidden veil that is still there. There are layers [in the painting], to reveal the stuff that's not there [in existence now], so they're apparent without obscuring them. At some time I want to paint the history of trees that were there and are now not there by painting moss and lichen over them so they'd be present but unseen, and I am working hard to see this, do this, the history [to the trees].
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How do you use memory in your paintings?
First of all, sitting and drawing a tree is too much work, to copy is hard. I look at the woods and see them in the brain. This captures the feeling of what it is like to be in the presence of the trees, the woods, rather than literally describing what's on the landscape. What could happen [in the landscape]....that's what is interesting. I leave the feeling and memory, look at the pictures [I take from photographs], and never use them in the paintings. I make the paintings up. When you work from imagination it self edits, so you only remember what is important to you. Each one of us remembers something different at all times. This grounds reality, if you love the memories, you remember them. It has to be in your blood, when and where you find your place and then work from.
Why is there no human intervention in your painting?
I like to be in the woods with myself, a meditation, so I can have a direct conversation with a leaf, or the mosquito that will bite me. I am sitting here on the lakeshore. If I put a person in the painting, you [the viewer] will relate to it. If there's no human, you become part of the land or those animals instead of the human conversation.
How do you go about creating your frames?
I grew up in the 1950's and '60's with the abstract expressionists. Another artist believed the frame serves like a window. The stripped steel than works for an abstract. In the north, all the cabins I visited then had knotty pine and the people [who used or lived in them] got drunken crazy and stuck their knives in them, making the walls interesting. So, [in my frames], I am making it a window plus a reverence for that history. This satisfies another part of the story telling on the frames, so they can be symbolic or more personal. The two of them [the frame and the painting] can complete and complement one another. There's as much time working on the frames as on the painting. They're separate but work together.
How do you name your paintings?
I lived near Wausau, and was always interested in the original meaning of these names. Many have them...Milwaukee means "of the good land." There are names in Minnesota, Michigan, Iowa and Ohio. I am indebted in an amazing way to native languages. In Canada, the names haven't been anglicized so much, and they're all consonants, few vowels. In Ojibwa [the language] there's almost all verbs, subtle words to describe nuances, nuances in movement. So I'm interested in the meanings, magic and mystery. I started naming the paintings about lakes I traveled, all aren't real places, like a writer. Sooner or later I used a map on the entire lakes of Ontario. Then geological maps from Hudson Bay. Finally a fellow UWM professor in American Indian studies gave me a copy of a book from a Catholic Priest in the 17th century. This is the complete lexicon to words from Ojibwa to English, and from English to Ojibwa. His secretary copied the whole book for me. So now there are words that I liked the look of and connected to the paintings, logical connections. There are no translations and that provides the mystery. Not knowing is better than knowing.
Tory Folliard Gallery presents "Tom Uttech: Boreal Conversations" through April 9. Also opening in Folliard's East Gallery on February 18 will be the nationally known Wisconsin realism painter in the exhibition "Craig Blietz Midwest" that continues through March 16.
