NORTHERN LIGHTS REVEALED
NOW ON EXHIBIT AT THE AGH: A pair of Inuit artists who draw a world they know best
“Even if life is hard, keep drawing.”
Kenojuak Ashevak said this to her nephew Tim Pitsiulak. He took her advice. Their drawings are on show in Drawing Life, a gorgeous exhibition at the Art Gallery of Hamilton.
Drawing on paper with pencil was Ashevak’s first love, but she was also a sculptor and painter. She became Canada’s best known Inuit artist.
Ashevak (1927-2013) was born on Baffin Island, Nunavut. She began drawing in the 1950s and sent her drawings to a printmaking co-operative in Cape Dorset to be made into prints. In 1966 she moved to Cape Dorset. Her subjects include animals, human figures and birds, especially owls. Her stonecut print, “Enchanted Owl,” was reproduced on the six cent postage stamp commemorating the centennial of the Northwest Territories in 1970.
An owl, maybe an enchanted one, takes centre stage in “Untitled.” Drawn in an emphatically frontal and symmetrical way, the owl sits on a pair of leaves. Flowers surround it.
Ashevak arranges the flowers with care. Three purple blooms alternate with two magenta ones. Bulblike red flowers flank each magenta flower.
“I may start off at one end of a form not even knowing what the entirety of the form is going to be; just drawing as I am thinking, thinking as I am drawing,” Ashevak said. Her art is stylized, spacious and linear. She builds up her forms with short multicoloured lines, and usually outlines them with a felt pen.
In another “Untitled” drawing, Ashevak orders nine birds into a pleasing arrangement. She once said her aim was always “to make something beautiful, that is all.”
A group of birds with webbed feet, all drawn in profile, stand or walk on an invisible ground line. Their closed beaks suggest quietness. She liked the challenge of making figures look similar. “I try to make them look the same,” she said. “With those erasable pencils, I drew them correct by erasing until they look the same, which is, at times, difficult.”
But she adds variety by lining the nine birds up in threes. And she changes their destinations, alternating the direction in which each row faces.
Like Ashevak, Pitsiulak (1967-2016) embraced drawing and sculpture. He was also born on Baffin Island, moving to Cape Dorset in 2002.
In “Impossible” he draws himself drawing. Wearing a baseball cap and glasses, he outlines a whale on a walrus tusk. He’s already drawn a pair of hunters in kayaks approaching the whale. The narrower part of the tusk contains traditional markings. Pitsiulak is known for his big, almost monochromatic, drawings of animals associated with traditional Inuit hunting: seals, caribou and bears.
“I am a hunter and I know the land and the animals of the north,” he said.
“Walking on Thin Ice” has us looking down on a polar bear whose bigness he makes strikingly obvious by having it take up the whole space. Lots of thin pencil lines running in many directions create the illusion of fur on a bulky body. Pitsiulak said he worked first by taking photographs, then drawing in the studio.
Regina Haggo, art historian, public speaker, curator and former professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, teaches at the Dundas Valley School of Art.