A Remembrance of a great Chickasaw artist: Tom Phillips

Tom Phillips

“Capitol Building” by Tom Phillips.

“Chickasaw Removal” by Chickasaw artist Tom Phillips

By Richard Green, Contributing Writer

Tom started painting early every morning, so when I arrived at 8 a.m. he had been at it for some time. His second-story studio had large glass windows and since the building was on a hill, he could gaze out on one of the country’s premier urban vistas: San Francisco.

Didn’t he find a view like that distracting? Not while he was working, he said. But he wanted me to know that he never took that particular vista for granted. I said I just wanted to sit and watch him work for awhile. It was July 1999, and Tom was working on a large oil painting he called “Chickasaws Defend Their Homeland.” This was his sixth painting commissioned by his tribe. On a moonlit night, warriors were leaving their camp in canoes, heading across the Mississippi to engage the French forces in the distance.

At the moment he was demonstrating a glazing technique with an airbrush that bathed the scene in a glowing light as if the painted moon were actually reflecting the sun’s light. To achieve the result, Tom blended paint on a palette until he got the color that he thought would give the desired effect. Then he mixed the paint with a kind of linseed oil, varnish and turpentine. Actually, the paint, he said, scattered into small bits that reflected light. Using an airbrush, air pressure converted the medium into a fine spray, which he applied to the portions of the painting that he wanted to glow.

He was applying the mixture when I suddenly sensed movement to my left. Then, in a shocking blink of recognition there appeared on my left shoulder some sort of disfigured mammal. Tom turned off his air pressure apparatus and smiled, then chuckled. The mammal fled to him, and suddenly I could see that it appeared to be a cat, but one with no hair, only a few long wispy strands here and there.  Still smiling, Tom told me not to be alarmed, that it was a hairless cat, a special and expensive breed. He elaborated, but still startled, I didn’t process much of it. The cat’s hairless and very wrinkled pink skin seemed to magnify greatly its eyes and ears, adding to its overall weirdness.

Tom sat down in a chair, nestling the cat in his lap and stroking its…skin.  He smiled—a big mirthful smile—and looking at me, said, “Okay, now you’re initiated.                                                           

***  

I spent two days interviewing Tom on audiotape, watching him work, and accompanying him when a friend transported us for one of their weekly evenings of teaching art to underprivileged kids. During the prolonged interviews, he was usually soft spoken, thoughtful and articulate. But he clearly liked the give and take of discussions. He was opinionated and passionate about certain things, particularly art and artists. He literally shook with indignation a couple of times. At other times, he turned the tables and asked me questions about specific events in Chickasaw history. After we’d been together for awhile, Tom loosened up and his responses included some amusing anecdotes and Army stories; he often blended irony and humor.

His artistic talent was obvious to his parents when he was 4, in 1931. Soon thereafter, Tom’s father, William Ross Phillips, arranged for his son to have private art lessons in Enid. He said the lessons included drawing nude models when he was only 10. Tom said he couldn’t recall being embarrassed doing the drawings, but “certainly was when my father showed the drawings to visitors.”

Although Mr. Phillips encouraged his son to become an artist, he wanted Tom to avoid the modernist movement that he felt was sweeping through college campuses like an ill wind. Mr. Phillips grew up admiring the great Western painters, Charles Russell and Frederic Remington, and hoped that his son would develop along those lines. So to avoid the taint of modern art and have a vocation to fall back on if needed, Tom received training as a commercial illustrator.

It was a good thing, too, because after his stint in the Army ended in 1952, he spent the next 20 years making a good living for his wife and children as a commercial illustrator and livestock artist. During those last five years, he had driven into the mountains above Colorado Springs on weekends and painted. A street scene of Cripple Creek was the first painting he sold, for $25. Word got around. He sold several more watercolors and oils for higher prices, and thought maybe he could make it as a full-time artist. He resigned his job in 1972.

But Tom was no salesman and buyers were not flocking to his door. Looking for direction, he enrolled in an adult education course taught by Thomas Crazy Eagle, a Sioux medicine man from the Rosebud Reservation. “It was me [a middle-aged married man with children] and a bunch of hippie kids sitting in a circle around this deer skull, which our instructor said was his altar. I thought, ‘What am I doing here?’”

But Tom persevered, and soon had faith in Crazy Eagle’s ability as a seer. “I told him I’d recently quit my job to become a full-time artist, and asked if this was the right thing to do. He said, “Yes, absolutely. You will be successful.’”

Tom repeatedly visited Crazy Eagle on the Rosebud Reservation, and after spending time with the medicine man in his sweat lodge, he always came away imbued with a renewed sense of purpose. He began researching and painting scenes from Plains Indian history, and he met Mark Anstendig, a man he says profoundly influenced his thinking and art. Mark was trained in music and photography, but his main interest involved achieving optimal clarity and precision. He showed Tom that his heightened skills could improve the artist’s work. Their business partnership, located in San Francisco, “allowed me to see and reproduce things far more sensitively and clearly” said Tom.

***

Members of Tom’s own tribe, the Chickasaws, were certainly impressed with his work, but Glenda Galvan of the Cultural Resources department wondered why he had never painted Chickasaw scenes or people. When she asked him in the early 1990s, he said he didn’t have enough information. Glenda sent Tom articles on Chickasaw history and invited him to send the tribe pencil sketches for consideration. That nudge was all he needed.

Fifty years before, Tom had been very moved by a photo of a painting of the Cherokee Trail of Tears, and now he was ready to paint his own version of “Chickasaw Removal.” When Galvan and Chickasaw artist Jeannie Barbour saw Tom’s 30 by 20 inch pencil sketch, they were extremely impressed by its emotional power and detail depicted in the scene. It is winter and overcast; the trees are bare and small patches of snow remain on the ground. Bundled up in blankets, family members are huddled around a baby whose little face is visible above the side of a small basket lined with a mud-stained cloth. The basket is perched near the lip of a hole in the ground that will be the baby’s grave. The mourners’ expressions of grief and pain are heartbreaking. It takes little imagination to hear their wailing, the shaman’s chanting and rattle shaking and the funereal drumbeat. In the background, stretching from one end of the picture to the other, is a line of Chickasaws trudging westward, in covered wagons, on horseback, on foot.

With their fervent recommendation and Gov. Anoatubby’s whole-hearted support, Tom painted the scene for the tribe. Over the next decade, he transformed seven more scenes of 18th century events from the concept sketches to oils. Each sketch and painting took months of almost daily work to complete, such was Tom’s passion for authenticity, detail and technique.

Paintings such as “Chickasaw Trade Fair,” “Migration Legend” and “The First Encounter” with the Spanish expedition of Hernando de Soto, are large sweeping panoramas. But even the tiniest figures are fully formed, though viewers might need a magnifying glass to recognize them. The paintings are so realistic and detailed that to do them justice people have to examine them in sections. Furthermore, the colors are so beautiful and the light so luminescent that these qualities often absorb viewers well before they are aware of the scene itself.

***

Tom returned home to Oklahoma in August. Since he was living in Norman and had been born in Chickasha, his journey had come virtually full circle. He had been worried for years about memory lapses and in 1999 he had asked me if I thought he had Alzheimer’s disease. I said certainly not. But there is an imperceptible line between chronic forgetfulness and dementia, and Tom apparently crossed it sometime in the new millennium, but he continued to paint until two years ago. He was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s earlier this year.

His son, Steve Phillips, moved him into the Veterans Center in Norman. Happy to be back in Oklahoma, Tom began drawing sketches of his neighbors. Quite pleased, they encouraged him to resume painting. Emotionally buoyed by their support and the staff’s, Tom hoped to paint a wall mural of the Oklahoma Land Run at the center.

Simultaneously, he was honored with a Master of Heritage Award from the Five Civilized Tribes Museum in Muskogee on October 8. Tom was only the third artist so designated, following Cecil Dick, Cherokee, and Jerome Tiger, Creek-Seminole, (posthumously). Steve said his father fortunately had one of his better days and thoroughly enjoyed the event.

The museum’s interim director, Mary Robinson, told me that Tom certainly deserved the honor given his portfolio of stunning and technically brilliant paintings of Chickasaw historical events and people. She also said the museum wanted to honor Tom while he was still alive. They made it by three days. Early on October 11, Tom suffered a massive heart attack and passed away.

He leaves behind an enviable record of achievement and a legacy. As long as there is a Chickasaw Nation, people will enjoy Tom’s great works of art. While that is quite enough, Chickasaws are also inspired by his artistic mastery, which illuminates important elements of tribal history. Some have been or will be motivated to study their heritage. Others will have been stimulated by one of his paintings, or perhaps his body of work, to create art or begin a career as an artist. We will never know the numbers because these moments, though often passionately felt, are private. But we take for granted that such crucibles are among the most vital ways that the work of Tom Phillips will endure.