Review by Margaret Hawkins, Chicago Sun Times, July 23, 2004
A swift, none-too-scenic drive 90 minutes north on Interstate 94 from Chicago to Milwaukee will deliver the art pilgrim to "Magnetic North," a not-to-be-missed 20-year retrospective of painting by Tom Uttech now showing at the Milwaukee Art Museum.
Uttech is one of those rare painters who reminds us of why people still paint in an era of photography, video and computer imaging. His paintings are inventions. They are made to give us sight and insight into what would otherwise remain unseen, and this view bears little relation to what might have been recorded by a camera. Painters always used to do this. Without the literalness of photography tempting medieval religious painters or painters of mythology and fantasy, artists were free to make things up, and they were successful at this to the extent that they believed in what they made. Uttech still paints this way.
But such praise is abstract, and Uttech and his paintings are the opposite of abstract. He paints the North woods, its topography, its inhabitants, its light and its weather -- or rather, he paints his memory of these phenomena.
Forty years ago Uttech, who grew up in Wisconsin, began traveling into the boundary waters of Minnesota, northern Wisconsin and Ontario by canoe for long camping trips where he immersed himself in the cycles of the land and the habits of the creatures there. After the first trip Uttech declared it his spiritual home and has been returning ever since. The ensuing paintings can only be described as psychological self-portraits, documents of his encounters there with his animal alter egos.
For at the center of these almost hallucinogenically colorful, ceaselessly active paintings are creatures so soulful and challenging they seem like guides from another world. They hint at the Native American belief in spirit guides, animals who befriend humans to teach them about life and nature. In Uttech's case he seems linked not to one animal but to many, though perhaps he feels closest to bears. These dark, solitary, hulking figures hover at the center of many of Uttech's paintings as if to both welcome and warn us. They are so dark we don't see their faces. They could be messengers or guardians, dangerous only when we fail to understand them, and their message is spoken not in any human language but in the language of the woods.
Sometimes instead of bears there are wolves, moose, lynx, owls or birds at the center of these paintings and often all of these. Although Uttech's vision is remarkably consistent, his later paintings grow more densely populated. In these we see literally thousands of animals, most of them birds migrating right to left as if fleeing en masse from their encounter with us. Accumulation of detail can be a sign of primitivism but here it simply seems that as Uttech's perceptions become more finely tuned he sees more and must show us all of it. Because these are not photo-based works -- Uttech doesn't even sketch on site, only working from memory and imagination -- they can represent accumulated perception over time rather than the more literal experience of a single moment.
These paintings are frankly mystical though not at all pretentiously so, and Uttech is stubbornly down to earth about the whole matter, refusing to discuss what makes them any different than run-of-the-mill wildlife art. But there's no concealing what he's up to and if there's any doubt, just look to his skies. They are full of weird animated light bursts, northern lights, moonlight, lightning storms, yellowy dawns and fiery sunsets that make the paintings look positively aflame. Sometimes he takes more than a year to complete a single painting, using small brushes in many layers of transparent glazes to get these weird sky colors.
There's a whole world of almost gothic life in a Uttech painting, from fireflies to gnarled rotting stumps and tangled branches to flying owls with human faces. Every surface has been worked, even the frames, which are painted and burned with tableaux of devils and bears in canoes. The paintings capture amazingly well what anyone who's ever awakened in a tent in the woods in the middle of the night has experienced and that is that non-human life is all around us, denser and stranger than we ever imagined.
We, the urban, assume that the highest form of life is human and that the highest concentration of our own kind is where life is lived most intensely. Uttech's paintings suggest otherwise and they don't use human language to say so. We can nearly hear them buzzing, hooting and croaking, a mysterious language that is reinforced by unpronounceable Ojibwa place names as titles.
Interestingly, for all the superiority of Uttech's paintings to the literal photo-based landscape we are accustomed to seeing, Uttech is also a photographer and interspersed among these paintings are photos of the same north woods. He doesn't use them as reference and most of the film he's shot over the years he's never even developed. The photos are probably good but I couldn't look at them in the presence of those glowing, almost religious paintings; they did not hold my eye.
This exhibit is unlike any other I've seen in long time, maybe closest to the paintings of Peter Doig at the Arts Club last year though that work is more self-consciously art historical. It is well worth a field trip to Milwaukee, where one can also enjoy the elegant new museum building with its birdlike wings and ship's prow that juts out over the lake. These paintings would glow and startle anywhere, but this is an especially pleasing place to see them.
Margaret Hawkins is a Chicago based, free-lance writer.
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