Thomas Ex

He has been an asset to our community: as an artist and as an art dealer, selflessly promoting the work of colleagues through his cherished Tosh Gallery (founded with his wife Sharon) for so many years.

He was also a conservationist and participant in causes that indeed make of us all a community of kindred souls, as befits human beings said to have been created in the image of God. That caring for the welfare of another was most obvious with his beloved children, Samantha and Seth, who were everything to him.

In worthy ways he touched many more of us who had the good fortune to have known him, and to whom no debts of patrimony were owed. He was a generous man.

Tom’s declining years were a Job-like trial for body and soul, yet he faced the many travails and brickbats to his health, pocketbook, and pride with both courage and an accepting, modest, humility–a lesson to us all.

His love of Lake Superior and of the forests and rivers surrounding Houghton (and fly-fishing in particular) translated into many pieces of furniture with a Zen-like elegance, and especially to the rough-hewn sculptures that survive him-not just in our community, but across the Great Lakes region. Like Tom himself, those works have a certain humility about them which defies easy categorization. Those roughly chiseled wooden forms have, with the passing years, evolved with the land they now inhabit, having become integral parts of the landscape. They were hardly the self-conscious expressions of an over-weaning ego, but arose from far deeper sources, well-embedded in the matrix of the collective unconscious we all share, arising unbidden from that mythic dimension which Tom, too, inhabited and honored. Their titles are themselves evocative: “Keeper of the Waters” and “Oracle” come immediately to mind.

Tom was a myth-maker and that was communicated just by the way he collected his wood and stored it: curing it in well-protected sheds in preparation for the day when its correct use might deign to make its presence felt-for that fortuitous moment when the muse comes insistently calling and will not be put off-when Tom needed to cancel all else and, quite simply, be in the studio.

Tom knew when to reach for a character-laden Cedar log from an offshore island, with its twisted knotted fibrous composition; or a hand-hewn beam of native Oak he’d salvaged from an old barn, the scars of scrapers and draw-knives respectfully preserved from the days when the first Scandinavian farmers began to wrest a living from this hard land, their own building materials dragged from the woods by draft-horses; and then again, when it would be Yellow Birch or Hemlock he desired for their special qualities. He also knew which tree was not his to take: which elders of the forest it would have been a travesty to fell: and that is no small thing. That, too, is who the art dealer- whom you met at the door with visions of the rent, bills, and employees being paid as well as the taxes covered-ultimately was; a shaman who answered to a loftier hierarchy than mammon. And he was a bit of a huckster too, even a trickster, with a wicked sense of humor as befits an artist well-aware of the peculiarities of the world he inhabits. But, like PT Barnum, “he’d never cheat an honest man.” Couldn’t do it; wouldn’t do it. There were reasons for that and they need not be discussed, but it’s why you sometimes just reach into your pocket and hand a beggar a bill. “Bless you, buddy and have a good day.”
Tom was grateful for all he had been given: for the good people he’d had the fortune to meet and other seemingly simple matters that he knew to be blessings. He was also well aware that he was dying, and prematurely so, but that struggling against the inevitable is graceless and pointless. He asked that we build him no memorials nor hold funeral services but, quite simply, that we have him cremated and return his remains to the waters of Lake Superior at the place he so loved: where the little Brook Trout are so supremely exquisite in their colorful raiment, much as are the Lilies of Field; and there, where the brooding, gloomy spruces of the forest primeval, with cones upon them, no longer grow; where once stood the wigwam of Nokomis; where fishermen found occasional refuge and the French voyageurs once paused in passing to cook a meal or have a smoke or trade with the Ojibway; where the Riviére Montreal gushes out over Precambrian granite to enter a whirling pool of living waters at the edges of the great and eternal big sea waters of Gitche Gumee.

It is all much like the farmer being buried in his field and returning to the furrow that has fed him and his offspring for all those many years. For Tom, it was the tannic, tea-colored waters draining the Cedar swamps of the Keweenaw Peninsula that fed the trout, that occasionally fed his family, that fed his soul. And so he shall be returned there, as he requested, and his molecules will slowly disperse through the food chain and into the depths of the great, ever-changing, and simultaneously unchanging waters which form the backdrop to existence in this land he gratefully inhabited for most of his allotted days.

Tom was well-read, well spoken, well-educated, and a “Feinschmecker.” That’s a lover of good eating and, in the transposed, metaphorical sense, of all truly fine and genuine things. He was an aesthete in the kitchen as well as a good father, with no small amount of accomplishments to mark his three score and ten among us-as are many other fine folks-but this is the memorial by which he would have cared to be remembered. It will serve as a reminder for a few years more of a fine man, and be that document for as long as those of us who have been blessed with having known him shall endure. No more than that is any man’s lot, nor is anything more necessary.

Farewell Tom, wherever this transition may take you.