William Kurelek

William Kurelek was deeply curious about the world around him. While the Christian artist could sometimes take a moralizing view, moments like those represented in View on Frobisher Bay (lot 311) and Inukshuks (lot 310) bear witness to a refreshing openness. Both works are part of Kurelek’s Cape Dorset series: 30 paintings reflecting a seven-day working trip the artist took in May 1968 to Kinngait on Baffin Island with Terry Ryan, the general manager of the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative (WBEC). What distinguishes this series, which was exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1970-71, is its documentary inquisitiveness.

This tourist’s view, of people and landscape, is frankly observational and refreshingly contemporary—one painting in the series, for instance, depicts locals returning home after watching a “Cowboy Movie.” Frobisher Bay captures Kurelek’s unique sense of awe and humour: a vast and overpowering landscape looms before us, even as a bathetic snowmobile trundles by. The grouping of inuksuit and inunnguat—the latter distinguished as human-shaped—are likely at Inuksugalait, or Inuksuk Point, 90 kilometres from Kinngait. Both paintings are custom framed by the artist, reflecting his professional training in this skilled trade.

The Cape Dorset series was not the only body of work Kurelek made in and about the Arctic; but it is arguably the one that stands the test of time. Unlike his illustrations for the 1976 book The Last of the Arctic—in which Kurelek was urged by his publisher to produce “a record of a pretechnological society” before “it had its streetlights and Skidoos and telephone poles”—the 1968 paintings brim with a candid, authentic sympathy for the north.[1]

[1] Patricia Morley, Kurelek: A Biography (Toronto: Macmillian, 1986), p. 253. Kay Kritzwiser, “Kurelek: Documenting the Ancient Way of Eskimo Life, and Cutting Budget Corners by Eating Only One Meal a Day,” Globe and Mail, May 20, 1978.

Contributed by Andrew Kear, Head of Programs at Museum London and the past Curator of Canadian Art at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. Andrew co-curated the 2011/2012 touring exhibition William Kurelek: The Messenger and is author of the Art Canada Institute’s William Kurelek: Life & Work, available online at www.aci-iac.ca.