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How Tom Gilleon Turned a Genre of Nostalgia Into One of Invention

He has spent decades pulling Western art away from illustration and toward form, color and light.

Artist Tom Gilleon is known for his depictions of American West motifs—teepees, lonesome landscapes and Native Americans—that straddle archetype and avant-garde. But describing him as a painter of teepees is a little like describing Rothko as a painter of rectangles. Gilleon is, with his chosen forms, doing something considerably stranger and more contemporary than one usually finds in what is restrictively labeled Western art but really ought to be called American art. Now in his mid-80s and still painting most days from his ranch in Montana, he has spent decades pulling the genre toward modernism with a rigorous focus on color, form and stripped-down compositions.

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Diverting sharply from the work of ostensible forebears like Howard Terpning and Charles Marion Russell, most of Gilleon’s works strip out the sorts of things a traditional Western painting might include: drying racks, fires, horses, children, dogs. What remains, particularly in his paintings of teepees, are densely saturated blocked fields of color that seem lit from within. The best descriptor might be ‘maximalist minimalism.’ Each teepee is accurate in its specific tribal details, but “I don’t want to go back to the illustrative. Every detail that can be eliminated and still tell the story should be eliminated,” Gilleon says when we talk via Zoom.

That instinct for elimination came not from years of art school but from decades spent, ironically, working as an illustrator, first for NASA’s Apollo space program and then alongside Herbert Ryman and a roster of Disney’s top concept artists and architects to help bring not only EPCOT Center but also the company’s international theme parks to life. “I started out as........

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