Few prints allow us such intimate access to their making as The Arrival of the Sun. Its passage from drawing, to stone, to paper was recorded in the National Film Board’s 1963 documentary Eskimo Artist: Kenojuak. In the film, we see Kenojuak working out the image in graphite, Iyola Kingwatsiak cutting its sweeping forms into the stone, and Lukta Qiatsuk finally setting ink to paper [1]. The film preserves something normally lost to us: the successive touch of hand, tool, stone and sheet through which Kenojuak’s drawing took on its final printed form.

The 19 minute film proved enormously consequential for Kenojuak’s public career. Nominated for an Academy Award and honoured with several other prizes, Eskimo Artist: Kenojuak brought both the artist and the newly established Kinngait print programme before a broad international audience. Its success helped transform Kenojuak from a celebrated artist within the emerging Cape Dorset graphic programme into its most widely recognized figure.

Looking back in a 1983 interview with Inuktitut magazine, Kenojuak recalled just how profoundly the film altered the circumstances of her life. She could hardly have foreseen where it would lead, but its immediate effect was tangible. The income she received allowed Johnniebo, who also appears in the film, to buy a canoe from Lukta Qiatsuk and with it a new measure of independence. “For years,” Kenojuak shared, “Johnniebo had striven to achieve independence and now at last was able to hunt alone. It seemed like a new beginning for us” [2].

The film also documents the roles of Iyola Kingwatsiak, who cut the stone, and Lukta Qiatsuk, who printed the image. Iyola’s contribution is especially significant, since his involvement in the production of The Arrival of the Sun has gone largely unrecorded in the extensive literature surrounding the print. As Sandra Barz has observed, documentation from Kinngait’s early years of printmaking is often incomplete, making details such as this particularly valuable in sharpening our understanding of how these early prints were actually produced [3].

The documentary also makes it possible to set Kenojuak’s original drawing beside the finished print and see how decisively the image changed in translation. Most notably, the central face, closely related to The Woman Who Lives in the Sun [4], disappears from the final composition. What remains is more open and more concentrated. Birds sweep, circle and curl around the brilliant yellow sun, their long forms gathering around its return after the darkness of Polar Night. Much of the image’s force lies in its colour, above all in the saturated yellow at the centre. In this impression, that yellow remains exceptionally strong, giving the sun a heat and presence that seem almost physical.

That this particular, uninscribed impression was formerly in the collection of Terry Ryan adds a tantalizing layer to its history. While entirely speculative, we cannot help but wonder whether the print we have the privilege of stewarding here might, in fact, be the very impression seen in the film.

1. The National Film Board notes, as do we, that the term “Eskimo” is outdated and offensive and was formally rejected by the Inuit Circumpolar Council in 1980. Despite the film’s colonial framing, its documentation of the printmaking process remains an important historical record.

2. Kenojuak, “Autobiography,” in Jean Blodgett, Kenojuak, (Toronto: Firefly Books/ Mintmark Press Ltd., 1985), p. 22.

3. Correspondence with Sandra Barz, 25 March 2024. I am grateful to Sandra Barz for her invaluable assistance in cataloguing this lot.

4. See First Arts, 1 June 2026, Lot 18, which sold for a world auction record price of $85,400.00.

In my view, the close correspondence between Kenojuak’s original drawing for the present print and the finished image of The Woman Who Lives in the Sun effectively settles the questions that have occasionally been raised concerning the authorship of The Woman Who Lives in the Sun. More compelling still, at approximately 8:01 in STK-ID 36212, the stoneblock for The Woman Who Lives in the Sun appears clearly before the camera. (See NFB Archives, STK-ID

36212.) I realize that I am flogging a dead horse but for anyone inclined to suggest that this was merely a staged sequence, the longer archival footage provides an even more direct piece of evidence. NFB Archives, STK-ID 36206 shows Kenojuak herself drawing the very sun that would become the central image of The Woman Who Lives in the Sun.

ND