Joseph Firecrow 'The Nature Of ' w/ art by Tom Gilleon

R. Tom Gilleon Is an American artist born in 1942. He was raised in Florida by his grandparents in the tiny outpost of Starke, near Jacksonville and the storied banks of the Suwannee River. His grandfather had immigrated to the United States from Scotland and became a renowned 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 and his interpretations of the American West which echo throughout his work are genuine and unique.

Gilleon earned a scholarship to play baseball at the University of Florida where he took courses in architecture. He served in the Navy in the early 1960s and then worked 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 worked on technical drawings of such things as liquid oxygen systems rendered down to the precise nuances of nuts and bolts. "It was horrible," he says. 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.

Gilleon and his wife first built a home along the Dearborn River in Montana, and later purchased a ranch near Great Falls not far from the legendary Old North Trail where native peoples traveled millennia ago from the Arctic to the desert Southwest. Here he found clusters of teepee rings that harbored encampments, which still hold the fire pits of Western wanderers. He himself has slept inside the teepee rings, sat, meditated and sketched within the circles, contemplating how the camps might have looked centuries ago. The American West left a mesmerizing impact on him as an artist. He also reflects on the stories told by his grandmother.

Until recently, Gilleon has seldom spoken publicly of the spark behind the gloaming illumination of his ongoing teepee series... 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."