Tom Uttech: Early Paintings

Tom Uttech

Tom Uttech

Tom Uttech EARLY PAINTINGS

Essay by Robert Cozzolino

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Feeding the Pitcher Plant, 1971, oil on linen, 64 x 70 inches

Tom Uttech: Emerging Robert Cozzolino A blood moon presides over the pulsating phenomena that grows, sways, and emerges in Tom Uttech’s Feeding the Pitcher Plant (1971). Its searing color cuts open the unrelenting night that presses upon the quiet spruce bog below. As befits this unnerving but gorgeous lunar phenomenon, it occurs amidst a setting alive with anticipation; a transformation is underway. Tiny pale yellow flecks arrayed throughout the painting read equally as fireflies or stars. Twittering spruce tree silhouettes rise from the bog. They appear to slither and twitch, their shapes deeper dark than even the heavy sky. More insect than plant, their uncanny forms change out of the corner of the eye, charmed witnesses to the metamorphosis they frame.

Three pitcher plants writhe in serpentine motion below the moon. A creature with the body of a woman and head like a shaggy deer emerges from within the central plant. The pitcher plant seethes with energy, bathing the creature’s body in a warm phosphorescent glow. Black moths flutter to the light and land on the creature’s skin, each in turn becoming stuck, dissolved, digested, absorbed into its flesh. They feed her and perhaps she has a symbiotic relationship with the pitcher plant. The two flanking plants may bear similar creatures in gestation.

For those who know Tom Uttech’s work of the last twenty years, Feeding the Pitcher Plant might seem mysteriously sparse and unreal. His large-scale paintings packed with animals of the Wisconsin and Ontario woods are based on careful observation of place and its particularities. The scene in Feeding the Pitcher Plant appears to be a fantasy, a combination of invention and suggestion aimed at conjuring a magical landscape.

It was based, like Uttech’s recent work, on the accumulated memories of a real place. In this case, bogs he had visited in northern Wisconsin and Canada. They provided the starting point and settings for several of the paintings Uttech made in the early 1970s, but the creature that inhabits them emerged spontaneously from his unconscious. It guided him back to painting after a crisis that led him to conclude that he was no longer an artist.1 By the time Uttech painted Feeding the Pitcher Plant he had gone through his own personal and professional transformation. After earning degrees at the Layton School of Art in Milwaukee (1965) and the University of Cincinnati (1967), he taught briefly at the Arkansas Art Center and then landed back in Milwaukee as a professor at the University of Wisconsin. At Layton he had made his first major north woods paintings. They were dark and heavy, full of ominous shadows accompanying the figures stalking through clearings. Looking back on them, Uttech sees them reflecting the dread and anxiety provoked by the Cuban

Moth Eater, 1971, oil on linen, 74 x 70 inches

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Missile Crisis and the war in Vietnam. He was using landscape intuitively as a metaphor for the surrounding political and social turmoil rather than as a descriptive response to being in nature.

While in Cincinnati and Arkansas, Uttech’s work left any obvious trace of the woods behind, gathering rainbow colors, accumulations of biomorphic organic imagery, and in some cases bikini clad figures. The paintings sometimes included shaped sections and surrealist-inspired juxtapositions of objects and figures.

Despite their formal distance from Uttech’s north woods paintings, traces of nature popped in through a wolf silhouette or the device of tree lines. Gradually Uttech became disenchanted with this work. Pressure from instructors in his graduate program led him to explore subject matter and ways of working that proved incompatible with his nature. He had been pushed to align his vision more with trends in the art world, including Pop, Psychedelia, even Minimalism. Eventually Uttech realized that these outside influences had compromised the work and he felt out of touch with himself.

By the time Uttech arrived at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1968, he was troubled about his work and sure that he did not relate to the art world. If the things he saw around him were art, he reasoned, he was no longer an artist. He did not recognize himself in his own work. By 1970 this had become crystal clear. Uttech made a conscious decision to focus on teaching and spend as much time taking care of his young daughter as he could. Operating as an artist in the art world was no longer an appealing prospect.

Untitled, 1970, pastel on paper, 19¾ x 25¾ inches

During this time while he was home with his daughter, Uttech would draw. It had been his default mode, a constant practice since the third grade. She would watch Sesame Street, and he would draw with no expectations or plans. As he did this, it gradually occurred to him that he was purging the kind of images he had been making over the previous five years. It was not conscious but seemed necessary and it felt like contaminants were emptying out. Uttech was making images for himself. He had no intention of showing them to anyone else. No aim of exhibition, no reason to call them “art.” During one of these drawing periods, a deer-headed creature emerged on paper. It was automatic, appearing without preconception.

Fascinated, Uttech made larger deliberate drawings of the creature in pastel and charcoal. In these, the creature appears to inhabit the woods as a guardian spirit. One creature became many (invariably female) and Uttech accompanied them with moose, owls, and other animals. They emerge from behind large boulders, watch from the shadows, or are glimpsed moving between trees.

Uttech was excited and puzzled by the imagery and wondered about this figure’s role. It seemed to be helping him push away the art and urban references in his 1960s work and was guiding him back to the

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landscapes that he explored as an undergraduate at Layton. He was conscious that it had little in common with the art world’s obsessions and so gave him permission to think, “I am not an artist. This is not art.”

Although he was unaware of it at the time, Uttech’s newly emerging work had a kindred spirit in another Wisconsin-based artist, the older John Wilde (1919–2006) who regularly rooted hallucinogenic imagery in specific observed landscapes. Wilde would have shared Uttech’s rejection of the current whims of the art world, and relished his status as an independent. In Massachusetts, Gregory Gillespie (1936–2000) was also combining autobiographical content, dreamlike and nightmarish imagery, and carefully transcribed landscapes in paintings that veered far from what was current in New York. Uttech’s work had a context but he had no inclination of one at the time.

Eventually these drawings and the possibilities posed by the subject matter led Uttech back to painting. He situated the creature in the spruce bogs he had visited in Wisconsin and Ontario; it seemed its natural habitat. In each of these paintings, Uttech conjures a specific habitat through clear descriptive painting combined with details heightened as if to provoke the magical sensation of being alone in a remote area of nature. Moth Eater (1971) is set, like Feeding the Pitcher Plant, deep into the night, cold white stars pricking the black sky. They are reflected in glass smooth pools of still water momentarily giving the sensation of the universe opening up beneath the bog. The spruces have become ghostly white silhouettes as though illuminated by a large pale moon out of view. White moths float about the foreshortened creature, whose breasts have become frogs that stick out tongues to capture them in mid air.

Already in the early 1970s Uttech was making regular trips to Quetico Provincial Park and wilderness area in Ontario just north of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters. It became a place of spiritual refuge for Uttech and provided the inspiration for his work going forward. Uttech photographed the woods as a separate practice and following each trip he developed new ideas for drawings and paintings. During these trips he became friendly with an older Anishinaabe man who also lived there. Together they talked about what they saw in the woods, including animals, plants, changes in the forest, and pictographs on stones. He became familiar with their worldview (at least that of his friend) and discovered that it was compatible with his own feelings about the woods. Uttech had been coming to similar beliefs about each natural element having its own spirit that required respect. Every experience of nature provides a moment to witness transformation, life forces changing into other forms, transitioning into other stages, attaining power through these shifts.

Untitled, 1970, pastel on paper, 19¾ x 25¾ inches Untitled, 1970, pastel on paper, 19¾ x 25¾ inches

Aino and the Trout (1972) not only picks up on this powerful sensation of metamorphosis but highlights Uttech’s identification of the overlap between these ideas and elements of Finnish folklore. The painting shows his familiar creature floating in a pool of water over which a Canadian loon glides. Uttech came to

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Finnish mythology through the composer Jean Sibelius and the epic poem Kalevala. Aino, in Uttech’s title refers to a character in Kalevala who drowns herself rather than submit to an unwanted marriage to an older man. She returns as a fish to taunt the grieving would be suitor. In Uttech’s painting she rises to the water’s surface glowing with a misty aura suggesting she is in spirit. Little orange fish nibble at her body suggesting her transformation to another form might be underway.

In 1974 Uttech painted an untitled diptych that shows an expansive landscape drenched in an array of dawn colors liberally illuminating all aspects of the composition. The setting is the edge of a hillside overlooking a distant lake and islands, a chain of habitats intermingled with clouds, gray owls, bracket fungus and birch trunks that sprout eyes. At left Uttech has repeated the motif of the deer headed creature emerging from a pitcher plant; at far right there is a birch bark man walking towards the viewer. Uttech’s image underscores the sensation some feel when they are the only human being alone deep in the forest.

It represents the increasing awareness that everything surrounding you there is alive and alert, watching you as you look at it. Each place you view reveals a shifted vista, a changed panorama, a living ecosystem constantly moving and growing, changing before your eyes.

Despite Uttech’s detachment from the art world, this work did attract attention and he had opportunities to show it in competitive group exhibitions. When he did exhibit he recalled feeling that it was like he had pulled a prank on the organizers; he didn’t care if the work was seen as art or not and it seemed unlikely that it was being shown. When he was included in an exhibition at Carl Solway’s Not in New York Gallery in Cincinnati, Marcia Tucker saw the work.2 This led to Uttech being included in the 1975 Whitney Biennial, with an untitled diptych selected for the exhibition. Somehow the creature had led Uttech back to the art world, but this time he was there on his own terms. He had found the form and subject that was most meaningful to him and it became the bridge out of a period of questioning into what became his distinctive work.

When asked where the creature is now—why has it disappeared from his current work—Uttech quotes his wife, Mary, who asserts that she’s still there, she’s just hiding behind the rock, concealed but present in the spirit of the scene.

1 My reading of these works is my own, but developed through conversations with Tom Uttech, February 26, 2019 and March 29, 2019. Information about the setting of these paintings, their origins, and Uttech’s state of mind prior to their emergence comes from these conversations.

2 The Cincinnati Art Museum hosted an exhibition in 2016 about Solway’s impact on the Cincinnati and national scene called, Not in New York: Carl Solway and Cincinnati, April 30–October 30.

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Aino and the Trout, 1972, oil on linen, 56½ x 69¼ inches

Painting for Buckingham Lake, 1973, oil on linen, 70 x 73ž inches

Diptych (Untitled), 1974, oil on linen, 46 x 76 inches (each panel)

Skull River Falls, 1975, oil on linen, 77ž x 57½ inches (each panel)

Skull River Diptych, 1976, oil on linen, 75½ x 59¼ inches (each panel)

Unlikely Partners, 1978, oil on linen, 59ž x 46ž inches (each panel)

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Algoma Landscape, 1980, oil on linen, 64ž x 72 inches

Untitled, 1974, charcoal on paper, 19ž x 25½ inches

Untitled, 1974, charcoal on paper, 19ž x 25½ inches

Untitled, 1974, charcoal on paper, 19ž x 25½ inches

Untitled, 1974, charcoal on paper, 19ž x 25½ inches

Untitled, 1974, charcoal on paper, 19ž x 25½2 inches

Untitled, 1974, charcoal on paper, 19ž x 25½ inches

Untitled, 1974, charcoal on paper, 19ž x 25½ inches

Untitled, 1974, charcoal on paper, 19ž x 25½ inches

Tom Uttech, 1973

TOM UTTECH was born in 1942 near Wausau, Wisconsin.

After completing his studies at Layton School of Art (1965) and University of Cincinnati (1967), he was Professor of Art at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, until his resignation in 1998. Since the inclusion of his 1974 painting Untitled (Diptych) in the 1975 Whitney Biennial, Uttech’s work has been the subject of over forty one-person exhibitions. His enigmatic images, based on his experiences in the verdant northern woods have few parallels in contemporary art.

His work is in the collections of major American museums, including Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, New Orleans Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, among many others.

Uttech says of his involvement with the landscape: “The woods that affect me are the boreal forest of the Precambrian Shield, located across Northern Minnesota, Wisconsin and Ontario and stretching to the Northern East Coast. This is a vast area of countless lakes, rivers, swamps and coniferous forests existing in harmony with protruding bedrock and populated by bears, lynx, moose, birds and mosquitos. This environment affects me most strongly in the crepuscular light of dawn and dusk. When I am there at this time of day, and with a clean and empty mind, a door opens for me to enter a state of tranquil ecstasy.”

This catalogue is published on the occasion of the exhibition

Tom Uttech: Early Paintings April 25 through June 14, 2019 Alexandre Gallery / Alexandre Fine Art Inc. 724 Fifth Avenue New York, New York 10019 212-755-2828 www.alexandregallery.com

front cover: Feeding the Pitcher Plant, 1971 (detail) back cover: Skull River Diptych, 1976 (detail) Catalogue © Alexandre Fine Art Inc. Images © Tom Uttech Photography © Alexandre Fine Art Inc. Photo of the artist © Tom Uttech, courtesy of the artist Text © Robert Cozzolino note on the author Robert Cozzolino is Patrick and Aimee Butler Curator of Paintings at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. He has been called the “curator of the dispossessed” for championing underrepresented artists and uncommon perspectives on well-known artists. He is co-editor of and contributor to Art in Chicago: A History from the Fire to Now (University of Chicago Press, 2018) and is curating a major survey of the paranormal in American art from the Salem Witch Trials to U.F.O.s.

Editorial Production: Julia Benjamin, Marie Evans and Hannah Salzer Photography: Maria Stabio Design: Lawrence Sunden, Inc., Harrington Park, New Jersey Printing: The Studley Press, Dalton, Massachusetts No portion of this catalogue, images or text may be reproduced, either in printed or electronic form, without the expressed written permission of the gallery.

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