Tom Uttech
Mikwendamowin
Tom Uttech describes Mikwendamowin as a “convoluted environmental painting” that captures the psychic essence, serenity and mysticism of a Northwoods landscape. The idea of Mikwendamowin came to Uttech when he was extremely displeased with a painting of a Canadian landscape he called “ordinary.” Out of desperation, Uttech says he started filling the scene with animals running in the same direction.
“I don’t know why they would be doing that, but I thought, ‘Wouldn’t that be something to experience?’” Uttech said.
Uttech hopes the creatures depicted in the piece will make an instant first impression and provoke further thought about the beauty and fragility of nature.
Mikwendamowin is part of the art from the original Burke Collection donated to the Midwest Express Center in 1998.
About Tom Uttech
Wisconsin native Tom Uttech paints outside of Milwaukee in his converted barn studio. He began painting and drawing as a child and has not stopped since. His paintings feed expectations of the wilderness, one that is both raw and wild, familiar and welcoming. Uttech’s world is one of waterways, shorelines and tumbling rocks precariously perched within thickets of growth. His world is woven together with both imagined and real elements.
Uttech has been a member and past president of Wisconsin Painters & Sculptors and has exhibited his work throughout the United States. In 2002, an etching by Tom was represented in “The Wisconsin Sesquicentennial Portfolio: 150 Years, 15 Artists.” In 2006, he received a Wisconsin Visual Art Lifetime Achievement Award sponsored by the West Bend Art Museum, Wisconsin Painters & Sculptors/Wisconsin Artists in all Media and the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters.
Uttech earned his BA from Layton School of Art in Milwaukee and an MFA from the University of Cincinnati. Uttech was also a professor of art at UW-Milwaukee until 1998.
