This unusually large drawing by Itee Pootoogook is based on a photograph taken by Bill Ritchie, then studio manager at the Cape Dorset Co-op. Pootoogook often used photographs as his reference for works. His earlier drawings were based on his own photos, but increasingly he used images taken by either Ritchie or fellow-artist Tim Pitsiulak as a frame of reference. In a way, this drawing falls into the still-life tradition; it is a study of an outboard motor lying, perhaps abandoned, on rocks – which remind us of Itee’s love of landscape. As in so many of his works, Pootoogook softens the photographic image so that colours, rather than line, define the image. The artist has covered the surface of the paper with nuanced layers of complementary shades so that the background does not in any way detract from the subject, which itself is also softly defined by shades of colour. Only the outline and the horsepower and logo of the vintage motor appear in sharp detail.

References: For more information on the artist and his art (including another work that uses one of Bill Ritchie’s photograph as the visual source, Cutting Whale), see Nancy Campbell, Itee Pootoogook: Hymns to the Silence, (Toronto: Goose Lane Editions / Kleinburg: McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 2019). See also Jessica Newton, “Itee Pootoogook: A Comfort Level in the Medium,” Inuit Art Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 3, Fall 2010; see also Sandra Dyck, “Itee Pootoogook: Drawing on Photographs”, Inuit Art Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 4, Winter 2016.