Jessie Oonark began creating drawings and a variety of sewn items for sale soon after her evacuation to Baker Lake in 1958 and continued making drawings occasionally into the early 1960s. [1] It is thought that she sold her first small textile “hangings” to the Baker Lake crafts officer Gabe Gély as early as 1963, and she was selling appliqué works on cloth regularly by about 1965. She also began making occasional drawings again soon thereafter; in the years 1967-68 she created a remarkable series of small felt-tip pen drawings on coloured card stock, encouraged by Boris Kotelewetz. [2]

Oonark was further encouraged to both draw and sew by the husband-and-wife team of arts advisors, Jack and Sheila Butler, beginning in 1969. Many of her drawings from this “later” period were translated into what are now classic and important Baker Lake print images. However, some of Oonark’s 1970s prints are in fact based on her earlier drawings from 1967-68, and perhaps even early 1960s drawings. We feel that this 1975 print, The Great Hunter, is perhaps one of those works. Its style and composition resemble that of a drawing from c. 1967, Untitled (A Hunter on the Lookout), illustrated in Sarah Milroy’s IAQ article, p. 89. [3] However, remarkably, they are even more similar to imagery from an earlier drawing by Oonark, dated to possibly 1963 and illustrated in the landmark WAG Oonark retrospective exhibition. [4] Whether or not one of those drawings served as the model for this charming print, The Great Hunter certainly preserves the look and spirit of her earlier style.

1. Three graphite drawings by Oonark were translated into prints created in Cape Dorset in 1960-61.

2. Many of these were used as illustrations in a 1971 book edited by Richard Lewis, I Breathe a New Song: Poems of the Eskimo.

3. See Sarah Milroy’s article, “Flashback: Jessie Oonark” in Inuit Art Quarterly, (Vol. 30.3, Fall 2017), pp. 82-95.

4. See an illustration in Jean Blodgett and Marie Bouchard, Jessie Oonark: A Retrospective, (Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1986), cat. no. 9, ill. p. 98.