Kenojuak Ashevak

Canadian Cape Dorset [1927-2013]

Order of Canada, Order of Nunavut, Royal Canadian Academy

Respected and prolific Kenojuak Ashevak, born in 1927 at Ikirasaq, Baffin Island, is one of Canada’s most famous artists. Ashevak’s work encompasses over fifty years of art including sculpture, thousands of drawings, and approximately 200 prints.

Kenojuak’s subject matter includes landscapes, scenes from traditional Inuit life, and animals – most familiar of which are her stylized birds. All are illuminated with her joyful colour play and detailed decorative style.

In her artwork Kenojuak’s subjects are vehicles for her explorations of colour and design. Her images tend to be “static” with their energy originating in their dynamic colour and decorative elements rather than by a movement depicted within the print or drawing. As one writer comments her “animal shapes [are] vessels for her explorations of line, color and positive and negative space.” Her work’s vivacity and exuberance captures the hearts of collectors and the public alike.

Unlike other Inuit artists she tends not to depict myths and legends. Kenojuak’s concern is that she might misrepresent them. Another interesting aspect of her work, as Jean Blodgett points out, are the motifs that appear in Kenojuak’s drawings that are not evident in her prints. Shamanism and supernatural images, for example, tend to be depicted only in her drawings. 

Her belief in shamanism comes from her grandfather, Alareak, who was a feared shaman. Kenojuak’s emphasis on traditional Inuit life also originates in her past. Unlike other Inuit artists’ drawings or prints, however, her artwork does not tell a story. Instead it simply shows related objects, such as people or animals.

Depth and meaning is created through Kenojuak’s concentration on form and outline. Her images are created with layered motifs and shapes, and varying her colour applications to depict texture. It is generally agreed that her early training and work with sealskin applique influences her designs. Sealskin applique requires a strong contrast between different skin colours resulting in well-defined dividing lines as well as a strongly contrasting foreground and background. All of this is readily seen in Kenojuak’s art.

Janet Berlo notes that the “traditional arts” that Inuit women practice make them “accustomed to the artistic modes of pattern, outline, and two-dimensional form.” Kenojuak, as a result, focuses on a print’s or drawing’s overall composition, then, and not hidden meanings. Blodgett (1983) confirms this perception observing that what concerns Ashevak is not the “subject matter itself but what she does with it.” Kenojuak is quoted as saying:

“…what I do is I try to make things which satisfy my eyes, which satisfy my sense of form and colour. It’s more as an interplay of form and colour which I enjoy performing and I do it until it satisfies my eye and then I am on to something else.”

Kenojuak finds intellectual challenge in the process of creating a drawing. Once she applies pencil to paper she won’t lift the pencil off the paper until the outline is finished. Her drawings usually do not have a preliminary sketch.

In contrast, Blodgett remarks, is her approach to carving. The hard Cape Dorset stone, according to the author, does not allow the artist the ability to create sculptures as elaborate as her drawings. Her sculptures tend to be “squat” and “heavy” following different themes than her drawings.

Kenojuak’s art is joyful. It reflects her attitude to life and not her hardships. In the early years of her life she lost: her father to a violent death, cousins to a hunting accident, three of her children died, her first husband died prematurely, and a grandchild was later lost as were extended family members.

Born in an igloo on October 3, 1927 at a camp called Ikirisa her early years were spent journeying between hunting camps on Baffin Island and in the Nunavik region of northern Quebec.24 During that time period Kenojuak learned hunting skills and sewing arts needed for survival as an adult.25 These hard won skills and inherent design sense would later be applied to her artwork in terms of both subject matter and design sense.

Her coming of age came with an arranged marriage at age 19 to Johnniebo (Johniebol Etyguyakjua Pee) – a man she barely knew. Her introduction to world beyond her Inuit world began in her 20s when she was diagnosed as having tuberculosis and was sent to a Quebec City hospital for treatment for nearly 4 years. Part of her recovery included working with crafts. 

Upon her return to the North she and husband would, for a time, resume their life on the land. Kenojuak and her husband would later forfeit traditional camp life, in 1966, to move to Cape Dorset where their children were going to school. Prior to that time they had begun initial work in art at the encouragement of James and Alma Houston. Their artistic work was perused more persistently with their settled lives in Cape Dorset.

Kenojuak loves children raising eight of her own and adopting eight more. Two of her sons are artists: Adamie and Aranaqu. In the summer of 2000 Waddington’s Auctioneers and Appraisers sent several copies of The Enchanted Owl to children attending a summer camp organized by the Royal Ontario Museum. There the children drew their interpretations of the Owl. Many of these images were used for the cover image of Waddington’s Fall 2000 Inuit art catalogue. Kenojuak was delighted by the children’s efforts and happily took samples of their artwork up North with her.

Kenojuak, known for her “self-confident cordiality” and “extraordinary personality”, has brought colour and joy to the lives of her admirers simply from, as she has famously noted, wanting to “make something beautiful, that’s all.”

Kenojuak passed away on January 8, 2013 at eighty-five years of age.