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Kenojuak Ashevak: Night Hunter
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Regarded as a premier Inuit artist Kenojuak Ashevak, Order of Canada recipient, is also one of Canada’s most respected artists. Her iconic images are symbolic of the North’s severe, almost surreal landscape. Her artwork, tending toward stylized birds, is joyful and subtly complex.

Although Kenojuak’s subject matter originates from her imagination and her life, a typical Kenojuak image does not contain a narrative or personal references. Her static images are not derived from a preconceived concept or a preliminary sketch but flow spontaneously while she draws.

Kenojuak concentrates on form and outline. Her images are created with layered motifs and shapes, varying colour applications and texture approaches. This emphasis on form and line originated from her early artistic work in seal skin appliqué which required a strong constrast between different skin colours. Seal skin artwork is characterized by well-defined dividing lines and a strongly contrasting foreground and background. When Kenojuak applied these approaches to her drawn images, which in the case of Night Hunter was made into a stonecut, the resulting image reflected the stark positive and negatives, symmetry and mirroring typical of seal skin designs.

Night Hunter is representative of the artist’s works produced in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The stonecut print demonstrates Kenojuak’s favouring of complementary colours, mirroring, contrasting darks and lights, and the layering of images to create one dominant subject. Also typical of this period the main subject is a sharply defined, abstracted and stylized version of a natural object, in this case an owl.

The Night Hunter’s radiating feathers as well as the reaching wings and bodies of the two companion birds draw the viewer’s gaze in and its hypnotic eyes mesmerize. Rather than appearing static, as Kenojuak’s subjects typically do, this proud hunter communicates its triumph after successfully swooping down on and capturing its prey.

www.waddingtons.ca/inuit

Clarence Gagnon RCA: The Ice Harvest
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In Clarence Gagnon’s The Ice Harvest (1913) the traditional lifestyle of Quebec habitants is celebrated. Gagnon, in contrast, was a sophisticated world traveller and well-trained artist whose perfectionism guided his approach to both his paintings and engravings, for which he was acclaimed.

His desire to achieve the perfect colours for his paintings would lead him to formulate and grind his own pigments. Intense, luminous and transparent colours were the result. From these he created modulated treatments of light, nature and rural life in which all three blend harmoniously. His paintings can be seen as originating from a Romantic Naturalist perspective in which John Constable can be placed. This is in contrast to the Group of Seven, his contemporaries, who painted dramatic and sometimes abstract renderings of nature and light.

Gagnon’s skill with subtle tonal explorations of light and air is amply demonstrated in the shimmering atmosphere and colour tonalities of The Ice Harvest. Artists such as Impressionist painter Eugene Boudin and Canadian James Wilson Morrice, both of whom actually worked directly from nature, would influence Gagnon who would paint en plein air himself. The explorations of light in shadow found in the engravings of Gustave Doré and Rembrandt would also inspire Gagnon.

In The Ice Harvest sharp winter light is filtered through the gauze of a softly warm and glowing departing sun whose blush and gold tones are gently reflected on the soft and deep mounds of a mid-winter snowscape. The tonal gradations and colour harmonies of the painting embody the painter’s Romantic viewpoint. As well, they demonstrate the optimism of a man who was comfortable with his art and his world.

In November of 1989 Joyner Fine Art, now a part of Joyner™ Canadian Fine Art, auctioned Clarence Gagnon’s The Ice Harvest (1913). Originally expected to realize between $250,000 to $280,000 the painting was actually sold for an impressive and record setting $495,000.

www.joyner.ca

Richard Hamilton: Release
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Richard Hamilton, painter and print maker, is credited as initiating the Pop Art Movement in England. His collage Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? critiqued modern society through the use of images from popular culture. Shown at the 1956 This is Tomorrow exhibition it heralded a new way of looking at culture and modernism in art.

Hamilton studied painting and technical drawing in 1930s and 40s London at the Slade School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools. He worked as a technical draughtsman before and during the war. In the mid-1950s he incorporated elements from advertising and the media into his painting and prints. Marcel Duchamp’s iconic images, as well as his layered, geometric approach to composition and subject matter, were a great influence on Hamilton’s subject matter and approach to composition.

While Hamilton’s artwork focuses on the transient aspects of popular culture his analysis and approach to his subject matter has always been technical and intellectual. Hamilton is not connected to a particular style but is celebrated for his pioneering use of silk screening, screenprint, collotype, photogravure and digitally manipulated images.

Conflict, political commentary, wit and irony have been hallmarks of his work. The print series Release stage proofs (1972) is based on a newspaper photograph of the 1967 arrest of Mick Jagger and art dealer Robert Fraser. The print’s creation involved 19 separate stages with each stage acquiring more detail as the image evolved. The deliberate out of focus and frozen-moment-in-time quality captured in the silkscreen Release intentionally recreates what Hamilton saw as the ‘unreality’ created by media coverage of the event. The distortion and hyper-real colours are deliberate in their intent to convey a sense of dislocation in the viewer.

www.waddingtons.ca/prints