Moon owl and sun bird

I’ve recently discovered a new world of wonderful, inspirational design in the work of artists living in Cape Dorset, on Baffin Island in the Canadian arctic. There’s no one particular website which will show you everything they do, but if you Google “Cape Dorset art” and then look at the images, you’ll begin to get some idea. Their subjects are mostly the animals that inhabit the far north, and they treat them with such honesty and respect and affection that I find them irresistible. At first glance the work may seem naive or even primitive, but if you look closely at it, you can see that there are actually some very sophisticated ideas being expressed

Even though I’ve been drawing birds and animals all my life, I have picked up many new and interesting ideas from their work, so you can expect to see quite a lot of Cape Dorset–inspired designs here over the next few months

And the first was suggested by a simple carving of an owl. (I can’t find the name of the artist of this, so I can’t give him/her the credit they deserve). The asymmetry of the wings and feet and the bright eyes give it a tremendous sense of energy and personality, but I was mostly interested in the upraised wings.

A moon bird from the Arctic

So here’s a bird in a pose suggested by the little owl. It doesn’t have quite the personality of the original, but it works well enough. The sun between the wings came about because I thought of the owl as being a bird of the night, with the feeling of the moon shining on the dark figure. My bird, however, was more of a daytime creature, with a reference to the sun, and once I noticed the feeling of a sun behind the bird, it was just a matter of painting in a blotch of yellow and emphasizing it by some light overstitching

The sun bird