The Vision of a Man Cutting Snow Blocks closely recalls William Noah’s celebrated 1971 print Shaman, particularly in its bold, almost anatomical treatment of the human body. In both works, the figure is shown in profile with the skeleton made visible through the flesh. Ribs, spine, joints, and skull are set out with sharp graphic emphasis, giving the body the appearance of something seen through and through, its inner structure exposed as plainly as its outer form.

The relationship is reinforced by colour. In The Vision of a Man Cutting Snow Blocks, intense yellow is paired with coral, then punctuated by red, blue, and green and held within heavy black contours. Shaman uses a similarly saturated palette. In both, colour does more than fill the figure: it pushes the body forward from the pale ground, sharpening bone, flesh, and outline into a charged, unsettling but electric image.

Jean Blodgett, writing of Shaman in Eskimo Narrative, observed that skeletal markings occur frequently in Inuit art and reach back to prehistoric times, often in association with shamanic practices. She cites Knud Rasmussen’s 1929 account of the shaman’s initiation, in which the shaman acquires the ability to see himself in skeletal form, “...by the power his brain derives from the super-natural [. He] divests his body of its flesh and blood, so that nothing remains but his bones." [1]

Seen beside Shaman, The Vision of a Man Cutting Snow Blocks gains an added visual resonance. The exposed skeleton, saturated yellow body, black-edged silhouette, and flashes of red, blue, and green all suggest a shared graphic vocabulary in which the body becomes both subject and structure, stripped open and made visible from within.

1. As quoted in Blodgett, Eskimo Narrative, (Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1979), p. 45.