Upon its release, Sea Gulls on Arctic Ice drew praise from critics. Reviewing the annual graphics exhibition, one observed: “The prints have a spontaneous and powerful effect [...] the [artists] conceive their images as simplified rhythmic forms, which are combined often with the effective use of subtle shading to create an almost abstract design. Such a print is ‘Sea Gulls On Arctic Ice’” [1]. Another reviewer remarked that, alongside Niviaqsi’s The Archer (1960, #45), the present print was ones he would gladly take home [2]. Sixty-five years later, both sentiments still ring true. We too are won over by the elegant procession of six sea birds stretched across the cream-coloured sheet, and by the restraint of the palette: smokey blue-grey deepening at the wingtips, set off by delicately rendered rusty red legs and beaks. Spare, sweet, and stylish, it remains exactly the kind of print one would be delighted to live with.

1. “Eskimo Art at Museum” The Daily Mail, (Hagerstown, Maryland, USA), 13 June 1963, p. 8.

2. Arthur Corry, “Art in Review”, Times Colonist, (Victoria, BC), 8 April 1961.

ND

References: This image is reproduced in W. T. Larmour, Inunnit: The Art of the Canadian Eskimo, (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1967), p. 67.