The colours of Kuujjuaq

KUUJJUAQ — The painted scene is picture perfect: at sunset, two women in amautiik pick berries against the changing colours of the land. The sky above them is a pale blue and the clouds are edged in gold. You can almost feel the growing chill in the September air.

The style of this painting owes something to French impressionists of the 1800s, but its subject matter is altogether Northern.

That’s no surprise, because the painter is Sammy Kudluk, who was born in Kangirsuk, studied art at Dawson College in Montreal and now lives in Kuujjuaq.

Most Inuit artists are recognized for their soapstone carvings or prints. But Kudluk, 42, is well known by Nunavimmiut for his acrylic paintings, which decorate many public buildings in Kuujjuaq and Inuit offices in Montreal.

Kudluk says the colours in his artwork became even more intense after he went on an exchange trip to Mexico a few years ago. There, he experienced an entirely new palette of colours.

“They said, when you go back, you’re going to have a lot of colour in your work,” Kudluk recalls.

Kudluk also works in other artistic media, drawing in pen-and-ink and creating eye-catching sculptures of bone and stone. And he regularly receives commissions for paintings along northern themes.

The stained-glass windows he designed for the head office of Makivik Corporation in Kuujjuaq send rainbows of colour streaming into the building.

Kudluk says he inherited his creative spirit from his artistic mother and his father, who carved intricate objects.

Soapstone carvers he knew while growing up in Kangirsuk also influenced his art. “They’re not well known, but they do their work from stories and legends. I was inspired by them,” Kudluk says.

A visit to Inukvik’s Great Northern Arts Festival three years ago encouraged Kudluk to experiment even more with sculpture. Contact with artists from other regions also opened up new ways of working with traditional materials.

Kudluk began seeing shapes in the natural forms of walrus, caribou and musk ox bones — a wolf, a face of a creature, a Sedna.

“They were like talking to me and saying, this is what happened before,” he says.

As he holds one of his pieces in his hand, it’s almost as if Kudluk is speaking to a living sculpture. His treatment of the stone and bone brings the shapes he sees to the surface.

In “Nanuk graveyard,” Kudluk has arranged bones on a small rock painted red. Despite its small size, this piece radiates a huge sense of mystery. The portrait of “Sleeping Sedna,” based on rock and musk ox skull, has wavy lines like seashells or water.

Most of the time, Kudluk finds the materials he needs on the land, and friends often supply him with interesting bones. He’s still deciding whether to invest in a $400 polar bear skull for a future sculpture — it’s a large outlay of money for the full-time, self-employed artist and father of three.

Kudluk sells most of his work through Kuujjuaq’s Tivi Galleries, where he also works occasionally pricing artwork, or the Fédération des coopératives du Nouveau-Québec.

He has turned a room in his home into a studio. There, it’s not unusual for him to juggle work on several projects and contracts at a time.

Kudluk designed the winning logo for the AIDS awareness program of Pauktuutit, the national Inuit women’s organization. And recently, he received the prestigious commission for a work of art that will decorate the outside of Kuujjuaq’s new conference centre: a hunter poised to shoot running caribou.

The conference centre will be the hub of activity during next summer’s meeting of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference.

Kudluk would like to organize an exhibition during the ICC conference. Like many artists, he’d like more people to see his art and appreciate his work, particularly his paintings.

Kudluk is hoping to get a grant to help prepare for this exhibition – and purchase the materials he needs for his work.

He says his decision to stop drinking 10 months ago is letting him concentrate wholly on his art.

“I love what I’m doing now,” Kudluk says.

As Kudluk puts together one of his sculptures, whose various parts cleverly come apart, he fiddles with one piece, giving it a critical look.

“If I do this again, it’ll be better,” he says.