Janet Kigusiuq began her artistic career with dynamic black-and-white compositions that captured figures absorbed in daily and traditional activities. But in the late 1980s, her approach changed. The introduction of colour, tentative at first, soon became hugely transformative. In her later work, colour ceased to be descriptive and became expressive. Some landscapes from this period verge on abstraction, their fields of vivid hue untethered from representational form.

The present work belongs to this later moment. The scene is built from irregular blocks of pigment, fiery oranges, earthy browns, vibrating greens, yet the natural world is still legible. The figures, a man and a small child, occupy the same visual weight as the landscape itself. The sky is an intense layering of blues, overheated and alive. The earth beneath them is a lush weave of greens.

True to her mature style, Kigusiuq delineates her figures with the blank paper, using absence as her tool. And they are drawn with convincing acuity: the father’s gaze lowers toward the child, the boy, in turn, tilts his head upward.