The art historian Marion E. Jackson curated the first exhibition of Parr’s drawings in 1988. Her catalogue essay captures the spirit of this artist’s works – especially his earliest drawings – beautifully: “…like ancient petroglyphs, they impose a kind of silence making analysis unusually pretentious. There is an arresting sense of completeness in each of his drawings, a balanced dialectic between simplification and complexity that becomes almost hypnotic to a sensitive viewer. With remarkable originality – for he had no models in prior art – Parr simplifies the visual reality of the hunter’s experience to approach a more profound reality, the reality of the archetype.” [1]

Parr was almost seventy when Terry Ryan encouraged him to begin drawing in the spring of 1961. This drawing, dated July 1961, is therefore one of the artist’s early efforts. As is typical of Parr’s first period, this drawing is a display rather than a narrative. Parr loved to fill the page with figures; they are orderly and do not overlap, although they vary greatly in size. The frontal human figures with their large heads, dot-and-dash facial features, and tent-like bodies contrast dramatically and amusingly with the almost stick-like man in profile. [2] Most notable among the animal figures is the large whale which, judging from its prominently domed forehead and teeth, is probably a beluga. This lively and incredibly charming drawing is a masterpiece of Parr’s earliest experimental style.

1. Marion Jackson, Parr: His Drawings, (Halifax, Mount Saint Vincent University, 1988), p. 5. Catalogue no. 6 illustrates a very similar drawing to this one.

2. For an analysis of the four periods of Parr’s drawing style see Ingo Hessel, “The Drawings of Parr: A Closer Look,” Inuit Art Quarterly (Fall 1998, Vol. 3, No. 4), pp. 12-20.

References: For similarly styled very early drawings by Parr see Ingo Hessel, “The Drawings of Parr: A Closer Look,” Inuit Art Quarterly, Fall 1998, Vol. 3, No. 4, figs. 1 and 2; Marion Jackson, Parr: His Drawings (Halifax: Mount Saint Vincent University, 1988), fig. 6; Gerald McMaster, ed., Inuit Modern: The Samuel and Esther Sarick Collection, (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2010), p. 167. For a fine example see First Arts, 14 June 2022, Lot 40.