Trying to pigeonhole R. Tom Gilleon's paintings into a particular art movement or genre is a fool's errand. Much easier to declare without equivocation is that Gilleon's interpretations of the American West are genuine, provocative and have a serious gravitational effect on the senses. He understands the places where the human heart and soul dwell. Those pieces of terra firma are part of his own identity and they literally occupy a corner of his visual landscape.
Gilleon is old and seasoned enough to hold an AARP membership card in the pocket of his jeans. However, he is a rising star known for the vitality and freshness he brings to the easel. His work is coveted by collectors, increasingly finding homes in prominent museums and is the subject of highly-anticipated public showings like this one, titled Northern Plains, before you now at Mountain Trails Gallery in Jackson.
His now-synonymous representations of native teepees are archetypal and primitive in their basic elemental forms yet they are remarkably contemporary in their aesthetic sensibilities. His landscapes are classic but exude spontaneity. Along with these, his panels and portraits of American Indians and cultural symbols are, on the one hand, illustrative in their narrative quality, and yet, on the other, so poignant in their iconography that one immediately thinks of Andy Warhol during the height of Pop and Op art.
By his own admission, Gilleon will tell you his path to the West was roundabout. Born in 1942, he was raised in Florida by a set of grandparents who bestowed in him a confident rebel's spirit. He grew up in the tiny outpost of Starke, near Jacksonville near the storied banks of the Suwannee River.
As a boy, his elders covered the yard not in grass but with a coating of pure white sea sand that squeaked when he walked across it. This inland beach was Gilleon's slate where he learned to draw and translate daydreams, later moving his sketches onto paper with graphite. Here, he also played catch with a baseball.
Gilleon's grandfather had immigrated to the United States from Scotland and earned regional renown as a cabinetmaker. His grandmother, a full-blooded Cherokee, was descended from a band of tribal members who refused to partake in the infamous Trail of Tears march westward onto a reservation in the faraway Oklahoma Territory.
With the spirit of freedom flowing through his veins, Gilleon's connections to the aboriginal inhabitants of this continent, echoing throughout his work, are real. So, too, is his affinity for the pure joy of discovery that can only come from finding a new land filled with new beginnings.
Gilleon, a pitcher on the mound during high school, earned a scholarship to play baseball at the University of Florida. Off the diamond, he took courses in architecture, a foreshadowing of his intrigue with elemental shapes, forms, and compositional structure. Gilleon's childhood dreams of professional baseball petered out. During the early 1960s, he joined the Navy and when he got out he started working as an illustrator for NASA's Apollo space program in Cape Kennedy.
He would like to say that his assignments were grand and wondrous. But they were not. He was actually paid to render technical drawings of such things as liquid oxygen systems rendered down to the precise nuances of nuts and bolts. "It was horrible," he says. What it refined in him, though, was discipline and focus. He grasped the power of simple lines and the importance of distilling the essence of imagery into its simplest form.
Forty years later, his compositions are evolved expressions of that foundational principle. "People still refer to illustrators with a negative connotation," Gilleon says, musing. "When Michelangelo was painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, it wasn't because one morning he awoke and got inspired to paint a mural on the ceiling of a church. He was an illustrator for the Pope."
From Winslow Homer and N.C. Wyeth to the late acclaimed wildlife artist Bob Kuhn, artists who started their careers as commercial illustrators used the technical precision they honed to be more insightful painters. Gilleon's grinding labor on deadline delivered dividends. Eventually, he went solo as a freelance illustrator based in Orlando and was hired by The Walt Disney Corporation to deliver conceptual sketches and designs for its Disney World theme park.
Later, he moved to California with a team of illustrators to work at Disney's Imagineering studio placed in charge of designing Epcot Center. He went on to assist the company with its planning of Disneyland Tokyo, Disneyland Hong Kong and Disneyland Paris.
Ironically, although Gilleon's grandmother had fiercely resisted her forced transplantation to the American West, the region, its open space, landforms, and human history left a mesmerizing impact on him as an artist.
During the early 1980s, Gilleon and his wife attended an outdoor painting workshop in Montana and fell in love with a beautiful piece of property along the Dearborn River that snakes out of the Northern Rockies onto the high plains. The couple purchased the land and spent nine years building a home. They paid for the construction using the income they both derived from working as an illustrator and painting murals. For instance, Gilleon completed matte paintings for the movie, "Dick Tracy." When a Hollywood screenwriter turned producer made the Gilleons an offer for their Montana hideaway that they couldn't refuse, they took the proceeds and purchased a 2,000-acre ranch near Great Falls, Montana with the profile of Mt. Cecelia rising in the distance.
Not far from the legendary Old North Trail where native peoples traveled millennia ago from the Arctic to the desert Southwest, their land itself was a crossroads. Tribes hunted buffalo in the prairie coulees and Gilleon has found clusters of teepee rings that harbored encampments, which still hold the fire pits of Western wanderers.
Gilleon himself has slept inside the teepee rings, sat, meditated and sketched within the circles, extrapolating how the camps might have looked centuries ago. He also reflects on the stories of his grandmother.
Gilleon never intended to create a sensation with his ongoing teepee series. Until recently, he has seldom spoken publicly of the spark behind the gloaming illumination of those works, magical in their interplay of color and shadowy light. "My memory of the important events in my early life are set somehow in dramatic theater lighting," he says. "We lived in a little place where there was no electricity and the inside of our wooden home was lit by kerosene lanterns. I always felt drawn into the light and everything around the glow disappeared into a blur."
Each of his teepee paintings, he says, has a focal point from which the lantern in his mind's eye emanates. "To me, other details of the scene are important and you can tell they are there, but I want to bring people into the welcoming light," he says. Anne Morand, Chief Executive Officer of C.M. Russell Museum, says "He has a wonderful combination of both accessibility for the general viewer and yet he's someone who is always searching for the cutting edge, making his work all the more exciting to serious collectors."
Because of growing demand for Gilleon originals, especially his teepee and Indian portraits, others have sought to copy or emulate his motifs, Morand adds, but they lack the depth of Gilleon's motivation that moves his work beyond the superficial. "Any competent artist is not content to just keep churning out duplicates. They strive to keep pushing the subject matter," she explains. "Think of a classical music composer," Morand says. "Or look at Monet or Michelangelo, or any of the other masters in the pantheon whose bodies of work demonstrated a penchant for returning to certain themes that intrigued them. "It is difficult to take an iconic image and see how you can keep it fresh and continuously reinterpret it successfully as Tom Gilleon does," she says. "He is not afraid to keep experimenting."
By Todd Wilkinson
