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Lawrence Magazine
winter 2012
Tom Weso Tom Weso grew up in northern Wisconsin influenced by the rich Menominee and Potawatomi arts of his family. He paints mostly in bright high-contrast colors to record what he has discovered, borrowings styles and figures from varied Indian art traditions to symbolize what he sees, senses and learns. Many of his works, for example, draw on strong themes and landscapes from the Native southwest peoples. In Snake Dancers, for instance, highly decorated figures balance precariously on a mesa top, perhaps to summon rain and to honor ancestors. “I was actually trying to paint like an Indian, but I realize that that’s not what I’m best at doing. I’m Indian and so everything I do is Indian art, but mostly I like painting basic landscapes. I like that there is an accent of spirituality, because the landscape is neither dead nor alive, but there is that certain rustic and possessive spirit in it,” says Weso. His painting, Ruby City, by its name and theme plays with the idea of multiple identities for a people and landscape. Here, as with many of Weso’s paintings, forms can switch back and forth between foreground and background, perhaps illustrating our constantly changing sensations of place, spirit and things in between. “I don’t think that we as a people—we are American people—that we really understand what our own country is like, or even our own backyards. We need to take some time to really see what’s there and how and why we are in that place.” In his work Winter Shaman, a deer-antlered figure emerges from a blurred blue-white landscape to offer a “magical realism,” in Weso’s words. “I want you to find the views relaxing, like I do, and sense a totality greater than the reality of the picture.”
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TOP RIGHT Snake Dancers CENTER Ruby City BOTTOM Winter Shaman (all photographs on this page courtesy of Tom Weso)