Nature and Magic Converge at Museum of Wisconsin Art in Tom Uttech's 'Into the Woods'

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Tom Uttech, Dream Net, oil on canvas, 1987, Lent by Maureen and E.B. Smith, Jr. Collection

If a picture is worth a thousand words, Tom Uttech has a lot to say in his comprehensive retrospective of paintings, photographs and drawings at the Museum of Wisconsin Art (MOWA) opening Saturday, Oct. 12. “Into the Woods” features scores of works reaching back to his college days at Milwaukee’s Layton School of Art in the mid-1960s and extending through his “Migration Paintings” of recent years. The exhibition is both the largest-ever mounted by MOWA and of Uttech’s work to date. In its breadth and depth, it presents Uttech’s vision with naturalistic grounding, magical expansiveness and psychological complexity.

Uttech is a man of well-chosen words. Tall, sturdy and every bit as composed as his artwork, he embodies the reserved and purposeful figure of the intrepid pioneers that settled the Northern Great Lakes region centuries ago. Uttech grew up in the small town of Merrill in Wisconsin’s North Woods amidst the type of “wilderness” advocated for by the conservationist Aldo Leopold. That practical commitment to the landscape registered early and never faded from Uttech’s mind, and this cultural inheritance penetrates deeply into his practice—one in which directed action and productivity take precedence over gratuitous flourishes and extraneous description.

A Diligent Observer

From the handmade frames of his paintings to the hundreds of documentary photographs in this show, Uttech appears as a quietly diligent observer and creator. That’s not to say he’s not a willing conversationalist, because I’ve had many wonderful tête-à-têtes with him about everything from art to spaceships. But when it comes to his own paintings, he’s happy to let them speak for themselves. Uttech might be the best example of that legendary quote by Barnett Newman that “art theory is to artists what ornithology is to birds.”

Which is funny, because Uttech is one of the few artists who might be accused of being an ornithologist on the side, his later works teeming with migrating geese, owls, blackbirds and blue jays, all painted with an abiding attention to zoological detail. However, despite an obvious care for particulars about the flora, fauna and terra in his subject matter, his artistic enterprise has always transcended the purely scientific. Nature, in fact, can sometimes seem a red herring in his paintings. All that taxonomic detail and natural fidelity tends to grip viewers’ attention only moments before the magical and psychological elements show up on the scene.

One of my favorite works by Uttech (which is included in the show) is a painting called Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s a dark composition of a musk ox interacting with a deer-headed, human-bodied spirit. Given the naturalistic perspective and enveloping, midnight-blue atmosphere, one might momentarily miss the surrealistic vision of an ox with its tongue extended onto the belly of the mysterious female figure. I’ve always seen it as an animistic take on Michelangelo’s God and Adam, but whether or not that interpretation flies, it’s nevertheless a thoroughly gripping and ambiguous collision between our world and those beyond.

This merging of natural and supernatural oppositions is a hallmark of Uttech’s art. The magical elements were more explicit early on, but he eventually chose to blend nature and super-nature into a hauntingly potent, unified cosmos. As a result, his later content—from granite boulders to lichen-covered trees to brown bears—is shaped totally by the invisible hand of the spiritual dimension. In other words, everything has a little magic in it rather than a few things having a lot.

Private Yet Voyeuristic

Yet another duality skulks furtively among the fallen trees and loamy forest floors, and that’s the complicated relationship between the artist and himself. It’s actually more like a triangle: the viewer looking at Uttech, looking at himself, looking back at the viewer. Uttech’s work is deceptively private and voyeuristic at first, but there’s a creeping sensation that the content is aware of our presence. The compositional devices of reflection and frontality build a story hidden by the thatches and brambles of his content. With patience, Uttech’s serene reflections read as Rorschach-like stand-ins for the reflection and examination undertaken by the artist himself.

Likewise, the many instances of eyes in his work over the years—on trees, rocks, bears and wolves—seem to function as a kind of providential lens, looking outward and inward simultaneously. These gazes ultimately break the fourth wall in his work and take it from sublime, majestic expanse to the more contracted, artificial setting of a stage. So, despite the superficial realism, the artist’s consciousness becomes ever more palpable as we progress into and through his work.

The abiding consistency of vision through five decades of production might be the most admirable quality in Uttech’s work. His practice, of course, evolves over the years, but only according to some burning internal narrative revealed in the work. His practice never bends to externalities that might date it or break that inner continuity. A Tom Uttech in 1980 is a Tom Uttech in 2019, which is a huge triumph in an age where entire art practices are measured on social media in seasons and months.

To speak with a singular artistic voice for 50 years is as hard to imagine now as a baseball pitcher winning 30 games in a season, an American Congress working cooperatively or a completely virgin wilderness. One never knows what they’re seeing is the last of his kind or the end of an era; Uttech might very well represent both cases. So, it might behoove you to go see what five decades of determined vision looks like at MOWA—before its gone.