It is important to recognize that Kavik’s work is not pretty. He doesn’t polish his work; in fact, frequently file marks are evident in the finished sculpture. In short, Kavik’s work is crude - yet his work is sensitively carved, his people have a soul and a power to evoke intense human feeling. Kavik doesn’t embellish his work; rather he presents us with the truth….in Kavik’s work I sense, not the capturing of a fleeting moment, but timelessness, immortality [1].

Stanley Zazelenchuk, a school principal living and working with his wife Jean in Rankin Inlet, wrote these words in 1980, the same year that the couple purchased Standing Figure directly from their good friend John Kavik. One of Kavik’s greatest supporters, and noting that this artist never worried about whether Qallunaat would like his work (but was happy when they did), Zazelenchuk went on to write that “Kavik is indeed a great artist; and when the sifting and sorting is done, Kavik will remain as one of the leading Inuit artists” [2].

Standing Figure is Kavik at his most primal. It’s a massive sculpture, brutal, yet touching and even soul-stirring. The simple gesture of the figure’s arms feels profound. Is he starving? Is she pregnant? And to think that Kavik was eighty-three years old when he carved this boulder. Could he even lift it? It almost boggles the mind. Awesome.

1. From Stanley Zazelenchuk, “Kavik: The Man and the Artist” in Arts & Culture of the North, (Vol. IV, No. 2 Spring 1980, 219-221), p. 219.

2. Ibid., p. 221.

References: For a good overview of Kavik’s work from the decade of the 1980s see the solo exhibition catalogue John Kavik (Vancouver: Inuit Gallery of Vancouver, 1990); this catalogue illustrates a number of large and imposing single figures. For an equally large and similarly styled Mother and Child by the artist, formerly in the Wagonfeld collection, see Survival: Inuit Art, (Loveland, CO: Loveland Museum Gallery, 2004), p. 98, and Walker’s Auctions, Inuit Art: Masterpieces from the Wagonfeld Collection (May, 2016, Lot 26). For the section on John Kavik in Norman Zepp, Pure Vision: The Keewatin Spirit, (Regina: Norman Mackenzie Art Gallery, 1986), see pages 108-119. For an appreciation of the artist and his work see Stanley Zazelenchuk, “Kavik: The Man and the Artist” in Arts & Culture of the North, (Vol. IV, No. 2 Spring 1980), pp. 219-221.