How fitting that the legendary artist Elisapee Ishulutaq is on the New Year’s honors list, for her leadership of the progressive Inuit art movement in the Nunavut community of Pangnirtung, on Baffin Island. She is being invested as a member of the Order of Canada – the country’s highest civilian award. (Above: Preparations for Food, from National Gallery of Canada / Below: Three Snow Geese, from the 2010 Pangnirtung Print Collection)
Born in 1925 at a seasonal camp near one of Canada’s northernmost communities, she spent her early years in a world where men hunted caribou in sealskin kayaks and women made clothing out of hide. When she became involved in the burgeoning Inuit art movement, she focused on works that portrayed that traditional way of life.
Recognizing the originality and force of her drawings, Pangnirtung’s weavers began using Ishulutaq’s designs as the basis for their large-scale tapestries, a practice that has been maintained into the present. Ishulutaq’s subjects include hunters pulling seals across the sea ice and kayakers paddling close to shore. Themes of Inuit mythology have also appeared in her work. -Biography, Marion Scott Gallery (Above: Summer Camp, from Feheley Fine Arts)
Umiaq, Marion Scott Gallery / Below: Chasing a Bowhead Whale, 1999 Pangnirtung Collection
Ishulutaq’s works capture the essence – and minutiae – of a way of life now preserved primarily in the arts. The following images are from the Elisapee Ishulutaq files of Canadian Arctic Producers, here.
Categories: indigenous art
Canadian Art Junkie 
Wonderful!
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what’s her paint medium? is it water color on some kind of handmade paper? the effect of a cloudy snow-veiled air, through which the paintings are being seen – so beautiful.
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Great question, one I should have answered in the post. Recently, she’s been using oil sticks, but usually carvings and traditional drawings which are then rendered as prints. If you want more, here’s a good page that comes close to explaining the idiosyncracies of Inuit printmaking. The Cape Dorset printmakers are probably more famous as a cooperative http://bit.ly/1cnfyUn
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thanks!!
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Wonderful style and art!
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I know what you mean about the style – almost minimalist and yet so powerful. And beautiful.
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Wonderful work! HAPPY NEW YEAR, Boomer!
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And to you Resa. Hope 2014 brings you everything good.
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I took some of my students to the McMichael Collection in Kleinberg, recently and we saw some wonderful pieces of Inuit art and a carved stone that was used for the some of the prints. A very interesting process.
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That’s a terrific place to absorb the printmaking traditions of Inuit art, a very specific process to be sure. My favorite remains Kenojuak Ashevak of the Cape Dorset print cooperative, also Baffin Island. But I love Elisapee’s work too.
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