Between Fathers and Sons
Artist families are nothing new in Inuit art. This Feature traces the unique and distinct relationships between fathers and sons and their art.
I first started thinking about the artistic relations between fathers and sons a few years ago when I saw some drawings that Qamani’tuaq (Baker Lake), NU–based artist Tony Anguhalluq had made after images by his adoptive father, the great Utkusiksalingmiut drawer Luke Anguhadluq (1895–1982). The idea to make the drawings had originated during a telephone conversation, in which the younger artist spoke about his childhood and his relationship with his dad. Anguhalluq’s work doesn’t resemble his father’s, but I was curious to know what influence he may have had on his son’s work. I asked if he would consider making some drawings that would pay tribute to his father. He agreed, and the following week I mailed off colour copies of some of Luke Anguhadluq’s most iconic pencil crayon drawings.
A few months later, I received a package in the mail containing Tony Anguhalluq’s most recent drawings, including five smaller drawings that were obviously styled after his father’s. One featured multiple rows of brightly coloured tattooed faces. Another pictured a circular shamanistic drumming scene. The images flabbergasted me. Instead of drawing his father’s portrait or working some aspect or theme into his own artistic framework, Anguhalluq had made brand-new versions of his father’s images. Of course, they differed. Whereas the elder Anguhadluq’s images are delicate, gentle and refined, these new works were boldly expressive and brimming with almost uncontrollable energy.
The compositional closeness of Anguhalluq’s images to their prototypes only served to heighten my awareness of the differences in style and sensibility between these two artists, throwing into question the notion that sons are influenced artistically to any significant degree by their fathers. Artistic individualism notwithstanding, my intuitive sense is that families, including their fathers, do in fact have a significant role to play in shaping the visions and expressions of successive generations of artists, and that families are central in the formation of artistic sensibilities, alongside other determinants such as kin and community.
A proud leader and hunter with a deep attachment to the traditions of his people, Luke Anguhadluq resisted moving into a permanent settlement for as long as he could, eventually settling in Qamani’tuaq in the mid-1960s. His images pictured spiritual and practical traditions— the drum dance in particular was a motif that Anguhadluq returned to throughout his artistic career. Anguhadluq’s most complex images, however, are those that recall fishing and hunting practices. A classic example is his brightly coloured 1976 print The Caribou Hunt. Here, two hunters in kayaks, shown aerially, pursue several caribou swimming in a green lake. As a lesson in technique, Anguhadluq’s image couldn’t be more instructive: before rifles were introduced, Utkusiksalingmiut would wait for migrating caribou herds to cross inland bodies of water, where they were much slower, ambushing them from boats with spears.
Tony Anguhalluq often watched his father draw when he was a child, but it wasn’t until the mid-1990s, more than a decade after his father passed away, that he first began making his own graphic art. Whatever influence Luke Anguhadluq may have had over his son’s eventual decision to become an artist, the younger Anguhalluq has managed to forge his own unique style of expression, injecting new life and energy into Qamani’tuaq’s rich tradition of contemporary drawing.
Whereas his father’s generation rarely included depictions of the landscape in their subject-centric images, Anguhalluq has made the land itself his principal subject. Over the years, Anguhalluq has offered several different interpretations of the rocky tundra, using stylized lines and striking colour contrasts to describe its contoured surfaces. Anguhalluq’s exuberant colour choices may seem decorative and unsubtle to eyes accustomed to conventional naturalism. But they are not. According to Anguhalluq, these colour casts and contrasts are present in nature itself. “I’m drawing things the way they look,” he says.
Although much of Anguhalluq’s imagery falls into the category of pure landscapes, many also include human figures and animals. In several landscapes produced by the artist, human and animal forms become lost to the eye against the densely patterned hills and slopes. Notably, many of these works also portray the same land-based traditions that Anguhalluq’s father preserved in his own drawings, updated to reflect the changing times. In Passing Through inukshuks, Going hunting for wolfs in Dec, 2007 (2007), for instance, the hunters use rifles instead of bows and arrows.
Not far away, another hunter-turned-artist John Kavik (1897–1993) moved to the coastal community of Kangiqliniq (Rankin Inlet), NU, in 1958, having already spent the first sixty years of his life in what is often still referred to as the Back River region, a vast treeless region located several hundred kilometres north of Qamani’tuaq. Shortly after he arrived, he began making stone sculptures for the first time.
Kavik’s most common theme was the single human figure. His earliest carved stone figures, produced in the 1960s, are dynamic and robust. Seated Woman (c. 1965), is an excellent example from this earlier, more refined phase. The carefully articulated forms give this work a formal complexity that was rare for the time. By the 1970s Kavik’s figurative forms became less complex and more self-contained, while his style of expression became more economical, forceful and direct. Woman (1980) is an outstanding example from this later period, combining containment and expressiveness in the same image.
If Kavik’s classic image is the single figure pictured alone in the cosmos, his son Thomas Ugjuk’s (1921–2012) signature is groups of human heads and congregations of people. An outstanding example is Group of People (c. 1980), a sculpture featuring multiple human forms, carved out of a single large section of dark stone. A highly tactile image, Ugjuk’s piece is notable for its round, flattened human faces and abstractly rendered features. Bolder and larger in scale than the majority of his father’s sculptures, Ugjuk’s masterwork expresses a powerful sense of human community and relatedness.
Like his father before him, Ugjuk turned to making drawings when the physical challenge of making stone sculptures became too great. Many of Ugjuk’s drawings feature lively clusters of round human heads—an extension of his approach in stone, utilizing repetition and flattening as important elements. The horizontal rows of heads in each of these drawings—all of which appear to be male—are all presented in a uniform non-naturalist colour (yellow, bright green or red).
Although they belonged to different generations, Ugjuk and Kavik both experienced the displacements and disruptions that upturned Inuit society in the 1950s. Each artist drew on different aspects of their memories of traditional Inuit life, evolving their own highly individualized styles. In their case, father and son were creating a new expressive tradition alongside one another.
Unlike Kavik, Ugjuk and Anguhadluq, Kinngait (Cape Dorset), NU’s Mark Pitseolak (1954–2021) grew up just as traditional hunting and camp life were coming to an end in the North. Born on southern Baffin Island, Pitseolak began making sculptures when he was a young man. An expert carver of wildlife, according to his son Jamasee Pitseolak, his skillfully rendered images of striding polar bears were especially sought after by both collectors and tourists.
In the mid-2000s, however, Mark’s work took a different, more narrative direction. One work from this period portrays a modern interior in five parts. On one side of the ensemble, a woman with a child in her hood is pictured working at a kitchen counter. In another section, a man sits in an arm chair across from a TV as a child climbs up towards him. More children play with a dog in another part of the imagined room. A work of tremendous skill and complexity, Domestic Scene (n.d.) is an engaging portrait of contemporary northern life. It might also have a personal dimension. According to Jamasee, his parents separated when he was young, with the result that his father was absent for most of his childhood. Is this sculptural depiction of domestic happiness and wholeness, then, an imaginative effort on the part of the artist to picture the past differently, putting together in art what had been fractured in real life?
Born in 1968 Jamasee belongs to a generation of Inuit who didn’t grow up on the land as their parents and grandparents did, but were instead raised in the new settlements. A lifelong resident of Kinngait, Jamasee likes to say that art is in his DNA: his mother, Ookpik Pitseolak (1946–2019), was also a well-known sculptor who specialized in sculptures depicting traditional Inuit life; and his grandfather was Peter Pitseolak (1902–1973), a legendary figure of historical importance in the community and Inuit art.
Jamasee began making stone sculptures in the late 1990s, and in the two decades since he has come to occupy a unique place within the region’s artistic landscape. Unlike most Kinngait artists, Jamasee mostly avoids representing human or animal figures in his sculptural work and drawings. Instead, his practice has been uniquely focused on picturing various objects, including sunglasses, whistles, guns, shoes and, especially, motorcycles, all of which he renders in stone and bone. Despite their outwardly impersonal nature, these ingeniously assembled works—some have moving parts—are often invested with personal and autobiographical content.
Given how unusual his subjects are, it’s hard to see how Jamasee’s work can be seen to connect with that of his parents beyond a shared medium and a common devotion to craftsmanship. But if the artistic connections seem tenuous, Jamasee’s expression has been influenced by his father in other, less direct ways. Jamasee was certainly thinking of Mark when he started making a series of small sculptures representing electric guitars in the early 2000s. These were Jamasee’s first breakthrough sculptures, and he has said that he got the idea for the motif while thinking about his dad, who played an electric guitar. In 2010 Jamasee produced a sculptural rendering of a grader, a large vehicle used to level roads. My Second Grader was similarly inspired by Mark, who used to drive the machines for the hamlet when Jamasee was a boy. In another sculpture the artist pictures an old wooden chair. A vintage camera carved from stone with a woven strap hangs from the chair’s top rail. Entitled Peter Pitseolak’s Chair (2009), this delicate, modestly-scaled sculpture pays tribute to the memory of Jamasee’s grandfather and his pioneering photographic work of the 1950s and 1960s, which was primarily aimed at capturing a transitional moment in Inuit history.
It is probably this orientation towards personal memory combined with his own biographical approach and strong sense of his place within an artistic lineage, that most directly links Jamasee’s work to that of his relatives, situating it within a long family tradition of thinking about the past.
In all of these cases, the sons who have followed in their fathers’ footsteps have drawn on the latter’s example, not in order to reproduce or mimic their unique styles of expression, but to give shape and expression to their own highly distinctive artistic identities, sensibilities and voices. What emerges is an intergenerational portrait of an artistic tradition that has shown a remarkable capacity to adapt and reinvent itself to meet the expressive requirements of the everchanging times. These examples show that there is no one way to think about the relationship between families and artistic expression in the North. They also show that family traditions do exist and take shape over time, even if the links aren’t always immediately apparent.
Robert Kardosh is Director of the Marion Scott Gallery in Vancouver, BC, where since 1990 he has curated solo and group exhibitions of work by Inuit artists from the classic and contemporary periods. He has written various catalogues as well as articles on individual artists, including Oviloo Tunnillie, Nick Sikkuark, Kananginak Pootoogook, Sheojuk Etidlooie and Mark Emerak.
NOTES
Interview with Tony Anguhalluq conducted by the author in May 2015.