Northern exposure

Some artists lead double lives, waiting tables by day and painting at night. Others come to art as second (or third) acts in multifaceted lives.

Jessie (nee Una) Oonark fits both categories. Born in the spring of 1906 near the mouth of the Back River in Canada’s central Arctic, she married at 12 and gave birth to 13 children, eight of whom survived to adulthood. After a missionary’s 1927 visit, she adopted the teachings of the Anglican Church, was baptized in 1944 and buried her husband in 1953. Oonark’s seminomadic existence in those years was typical of the Inuit inhabitants of the Barren Lands of Canada.

In 1958, extreme shortages of caribou and fish made that life impossible. Enduring starvation, Oonark and her youngest daughter were evacuated by the government to a settlement at Baker Lake in the Canadian Northwest Territories.

To survive in the wage-based economy, Oonark took odd jobs sewing, cooking, cleaning and looking after neighbors’ children. Within a year, she was drawing. By autumn, she had become the first Inuit in Baker Lake to make works on paper for sale. Her best customer was Andrew Macpherson, a Canadian Wildlife Service biologist, who also supplied her with pencils and paper.

A government arts and crafts program was established in Baker Lake in 1961. It provided Oonark with a studio, a modest monthly salary and a variety of art supplies. In 1969, a printmaking program was added.

The rest is history. Oonark drew prolifically, making up to 50 drawings a week. They sold briskly. She supported an extended family, buying them boats, snowmobiles and televisions. In 1975, Oonark was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

Some of her drawings, in colored pencil and felt-tip pen, led to distinctive textiles made of appliqued and embroidered wool. Other drawings became the basis for about 100 prints. Many of these silk-screened, stone-cut and stenciled works were featured in the Baker Lake Annual Print Collection catalog every year from 1970 to 1985, when Oonark died.

At UCLA’s Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 40 of Oonark’s prints are displayed in an enjoyable exhibition titled “Power of Thought: The Art of Jessie Oonark.” This engaging introduction to her boldly stylized graphics was organized by guest curator Marie Bouchard for the Marsh Art Gallery at the University of Richmond, Va. At the Fowler, 12 drawings and five embroidered textiles have been added, all borrowed from the Winnipeg Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

Nine of Oonark’s drawings have been installed next to the prints they led to. The side-by-side arrangement invites viewers to compare the formal attributes of the two media. This reveals many of the pragmatic and intuitive decisions Oonark made as she adapted her handmade drawings to mechanically reproduced images. It’s one of the show’s highlights.

Oonark’s style, which features simplified figures crisply silhouetted against the paper’s snowy whiteness, is perfectly suited to printmaking. Indeed, the fidelity between the prints and drawings is impressive.

All but one pair are exactly the same size. Only two show slight compositional adjustments, instances when Oonark moved her emblematic figures closer to the center of the page, intensifying their bull’s-eye effect.

The biggest changes occur between the large drawing “A Shaman’s Helping Spirits” (1970) and the smaller silk-screen, “Angutkoq” (1975). In both, a shaman stares straight ahead. With arms and legs extended and elbows and knees bent, his splayed, symmetrical posture matches that of an insect pinned to a scientist’s specimen board. (Oonark knew and respected the beliefs of her ancestors, but as a modern Christian thought of them as myths to be studied or stories that added some spice to life.)

In the drawing, a miniature man stands on the shaman’s head, from which a pair of pointed horns emerges. With a pair of wild beasts on his shoulders, a pair of birds on his knees and four pairs of animals lined up on his chest, the shaman resembles a figurative version of Noah’s ark.

Oonark’s silk-screen eliminates such associations by transforming the animals into abstract, V-shaped forms that sprout from the shaman’s limbs and head or a chevron pattern on his chest. Likewise, the wide range of colors in the drawing is limited in the print to gold, blue, red and black.

In general, Oonark’s prints replace the irregular marks made by the tips of her colored pencils and felt markers with solid blocks of color. She also tends to use black outlines more often in the prints, as opposed to light blue and sometimes pink in the drawings. This accentuates the graphic snap of her editions, many of which possess the eye-grabbing power of advertisements many times their size or the visual punch of American Pop Art.

It’s a pleasure to watch Oonark’s skills as a printmaker develop. The earliest images look tentative. Small and made up of numerous outlined figures crowded into the center of a page, these pieces struggle to sketch entire scenes, such as hunts, ballgames and expeditions.

By 1974, Oonark had dispensed with such elaborate narratives in favor of iconic simplicity, often featuring a figure or two whose postures speak volumes about their places in the world. When she wanted to tell a story, she did so symbolically, compressing information into abstract forms and stylized designs.

Oonark also experimented with more supple color combinations and a wider range of textures. Sometimes she shaded solid blocks of color by cutting hundreds of tiny lines into the surface from which the image was printed. At other times, she added multicolored dots to selected sections, creating an animated optical effect.

In several silk-screens, Oonark used ink so sparingly that the images look as if they were drawn swiftly by hand or cranked out with such urgency -- and in such large numbers -- that a few imperfections didn’t matter one bit. She also combined two types of printing, stone-cut and stencil, in single works, playing the linear clarity of the former against the velvety texture of the latter.

The five fabric pieces also feature simplified figures set against solid backgrounds. This compositional device harks back to the designs Oonark used to make in the clothing she stitched from caribou hide, cutting shapes out of one piece and patching in another hide to create a silhouetted figure.

Another highlight of the show is the way Oonark uses symmetry to energize her pictures. Nearly all of her compositions are centered on a vertical axis. But very few are perfectly symmetrical, as mirror images would be. Instead, Oonark allows slight variations between the left and right halves of her images. This makes them look both dynamic and poised, equally endowed with the liveliness of physical activity and the stillness of contemplation. Packing more into each picture than immediately meets the eye, Oonark shows herself to be a master of double lives.

*

‘Power of Thought: The Art of Jessie Oonark’

Where: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, UCLA Campus, Sunset Boulevard at Westwood Boulevard

When: Wednesdays to Sundays, noon to 5 p.m.; Thursdays, noon to 8 p.m.

Ends: May 30

Price: Free admission, $7 parking

Contact: (310) 825-4361