As a ten-year follow-up to the 1961 article Graphic Workshops: Printmakers of the Arctic: The West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative, published in Artist’s Proof by the Pratt Institute, the editors returned to the source; to James A. Houston, whose collaboration with Inuit artists helped launch the tradition of Inuit printmaking. The original article had captured a moment of emergence: a fledgling print program in Kinngait. Now, a decade later, the publication invited Houston to look back and reflect not simply on the development of a studio but on the unfolding of a movement.

Interestingly, Houston did not select The Enchanted Owl, the obvious choice given its prominence and early acclaim, as the image to represent a decade of Kenojuak's printmaking in Cape Dorset, though he does note it by name (p. 93). Instead, Bird Fantasy is the work he chose to reproduce (p. 95). In his reflection, Houston writes:

Kenojuak begins her image with a bird as the central core. Then slowly with her skillful left hand stretches the wings and tail plumage until it flattens and turns into an undersea growth of seaweeds and spirits and other birds endlessly flooding space with a brilliant pattern of light and dark.

Houston’s comments are astute, capturing with precision the way Bird Fantasy marries technical control with imaginative expansion. Kenojuak’s image unfolds in a single, undulating breath of ultramarine blue. The classic, early Dorset ink soars across the page like a singular note struck with clarity. There is no shading, no hesitation. Just the fearless assertion of form. 

As Houston notes, one bird unfurls into many, their beaks and wings extending outward like the blossoming tips of a great organic fan. Each form is linked in visual rhythm, expanding out like ripples or tendrils. Like so much of Kenojuak’s work, it invites the viewer to linger in the space between imagination and instinct, where simplicity is a form of sophistication and restraint becomes a kind of generosity. Beautiful.

ND