“Inuit Prints: Japanese Inspiration” and “Sweet Innovation”

“Inuit Prints: Japanese Inspiration” shines a spotlight on a fascinating aspect of the development of 20th-century art in Canada’s North. We’re pretty familiar with the story of how artist and federal government employee James Houston was sent to the Arctic in 1948 to expand the market for Inuit art, which at that time consisted primarily of stone and ivory carving, basketry and sewn handicrafts. (This abridged history is drawn from the show’s commendable catalogue.) It is less well known, however, that in 1958 Houston travelled to Japan to study with a master woodblock print artist, Un’ichi Hiratsuka, with the intention of powering up the production of fine art prints in Cape Dorset. That trip forcefully influenced the direction Inuit printmaking would take.

Previously, the scale of print work Houston had overseen out of Cape Dorset’s one-room “crafts shop” had been modest. After experimenting with block, relief and stencil printing on fabric, the Inuit artists had moved by 1957 to small works on paper, including linocuts, stonecuts and gift cards. Their considerable popularity in southern markets alerted the federal government to the possibilities inherent in establishing a “high-end” professional print studio in Cape Dorset. This studio was to have the capacity to generate major, editioned works on paper for what was rightly anticipated to be an eager group of collectors in Canada and beyond.

Houston’s time in Japan, from November 1958 to late January 1959, is ably recounted in the catalogue. In addition to working intensively with Hiratsuka, Houston met with and bought works from other leading Japanese printmakers. When he returned to Cape Dorset in the spring of 1959, he carried with him not only hands-on relief-print techniques but also an array of mid-20th century Japanese woodblock prints. These served as both example and inspiration to Inuit artists.

The exhibition, organized and circulated by the Canadian Museum of Civilization, comprises some four dozen works on paper, including both Japanese and Inuit prints—and it is their juxtaposition, for the first time, that is most compelling. Viewing these works together allows us to directly consider the impact of one culture’s revered tradition upon another’s emerging expression. Also on view is a selection of historic cutting and printing tools and a documentary film, Threads That Connect Us (shot by Michael Kahn, examining the relationship between a family of traditional Japanese papermakers and the Inuit artists who have printed on handmade washi paper for some 50 years), together with a few of the drawings and woodblock prints that Houston produced while in Japan.

Although the show and catalogue cite Un’ichi Hiratsuka’s admiration for Houston’s techniques, his graphic works look, in this time and place, competent but not very exciting. Some of Houston’s prints and drawings are stiff and trite; others are blurred and messy. Seen beside the energetic and imaginative stonecuts and stencils of such stellar Inuit artists as Kenojuak Ashevak, Parr and Osuitok Ipeelee, Houston’s work suggests that his students quickly surpassed him. Still, there is no doubt that his vision and knowledge enabled the Cape Dorset artists to found and sustain what would become one of the most esteemed print studios in the world.

Techniques and compositional devices that translated directly from Asia to the Canadian Arctic include the “bold, direct” monochromatic style of printmaking seen in Shinkō Munakata’s The Sand Nest, with its expressive, black-on-white depiction of a family of cormorants. This work is mounted near Kellypalik Mungitok’s lively Man Carried to the Moon and Mikkigak Kingwatsiak’s emphatic representation of a mythical being, Ugjungnuk. Also influential was the way a Japanese artist such as Munakata might directly incorporate poetry into his imagery, as in Three Owls (The Bright of Evening). Inuit artist Kiawak Ashoona’s stonecut on hand-coloured paper, Fox and Hawk, also employs characters cut directly into the print block to express the fox’s hunger and frustration.

Also demonstrated here is what the exhibition organizers identify as the Japanese printmakers’ use of “rhythmic patterns and textures,” as well as the stencil technique known as kappazuri. Probably the most famous early Inuit use of this form of stencil printing is Ipeelee’s Four Muskoxen, with its plump curves, lively energy and subtle gradations of colour and texture. Equally charming, although less technically accomplished, is Ipeelee’s earlier Owl, Fox and Hare Legend, hanging beside Kichiemon Okamura’s Iyon Nokka. The Japanese print evinces a delightful combination of folk-art and expressionist impulses.

That the Cape Dorset prints were pulled from local stone rather than imported wood (wood was not a viable material in the Arctic) is significant. The stone, more difficult to work than wood, was and is often carved and printed by specialized others rather than by the artist who created or creates the original image. An outstanding example is Kenojuak’s iconic 1960 work The Enchanted Owl. Here, the stone was cut by Iola Kingwatsiak and the image printed by Eegvudluk Pootoogook, demonstrating a truly collaborative undertaking of three talented individuals. This print, probably the most “collectable” of any produced in Cape Dorset, epitomizes the Inuit artists’ immense capacity to take an unfamiliar medium and adapt it to their own uses, to create distinctive and enduring imagery that is admired around the world.

Also on view in Vancouver this summer was “Sweet Innovation” at the Marion Scott Gallery. The show featured recent sugar-lift etchings by Tony Anguhalluq, Jamasie Pitseolak, Jutai Toonoo, and—again and astoundingly—the grand old lady of Inuit printmaking, Kenojuak Ashevak, now 84. The sugar-lift technique, a variation on aquatinting, involves painting or pouring a design directly onto the etching plate with a sugar or syrup solution, using a brush or squirt bottle. It is a relatively new process to northern artists and, as evident in the Marion Scott show, encourages spontaneous, freehand image making. The result, with all four artists, is loose and lively imagery characterized by liquid or jittery lines and falling somewhere between Abstract Expressionism and outsider art. The effect is quite distinctive from that of stonecuts, which reflect the dry media in which the drawings on paper are originally produced. Like the stonecuts, however, the sugar-lift etchings represent a collaborative effort.

As Robert Kardosh recounts in his exhibition essay, Pitseolak and Anguhalluq produced their prints at Studio PM in Montreal, while Toonoo and Ashevak created their imagery in Cape Dorset, with the involvement of Dorset Fine Arts and Studio PM among others. (Handpainting of the prints was contributed by Beatriz Sobrado Sámano and Harold Klunder.) Imagery ranged from Arctic landscapes, flora and fauna through large, seemingly fictional portrait heads. Among the most appealing work here was Anguhalluq’s Arctic Char Trying to Cross the River in July, a colourful image of a spotted fish passing through a succession of ambiguous loops. Most difficult to like were Toonoo’s big, confrontational heads, with their unsettling black concentricities, repeatedly strung around the subjects’ facial features.

Innovation is a curious word. Employed in the title of the show it obliges us to welcome the changes evident here. Not to do so would be seen as reactionary, begrudging the artists’ freedom of expression. We’re not convinced, however, that the loose, gestural approach to image making evident in the sugar-lift etchings is necessarily an improvement on what went before. It’s simply different. Still, it does look like the artists were having a lot of fun making these prints. And why shouldn’t they? ❚

“Inuit Prints: Japanese Inspiration” was exhibited at the UBC Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver from June 19 to September 25. “Sweet Innovation” was exhibited at the Marion Scott Gallery in Vancouver from July 18 to July 30, 2011.

Robin Laurence is a writer, curator and a Contributing Editor to Border Crossings from Vancouver.