Style combination · Contrasts

Kinngait Inuit Printmaking × Rorke's Drift Linocut

Two mid-century workshops where a community with no printmaking tradition began cutting blocks with an outside teacher: Rorke's Drift crowds a black-and-white story into banded scenes, Kinngait usually isolates one figure in colour on open paper; choose by whether the image should narrate or present.

From the research on Kinngait (Cape Dorset) Inuit Printmaking

Mix them and make something Kinngait Inuit Printmaking Rorke's Drift Linocut

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Kinngait Inuit Printmaking, their arrangement from Kinngait Inuit Printmaking, the finish from Rorke's Drift Linocut. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

What each style brings

Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.

Kinngait (Cape Dorset) Inuit Printmaking Rorke's Drift Linocut

Type from Rorke's Drift Linocut: Hand-lettering
Colour from Kinngait Inuit Printmaking: Limited spot colours
Flat fields
Form from Kinngait Inuit Printmaking: Stylised figuration
Biomorphic curves
Composition from Kinngait Inuit Printmaking: Isolated object
Generous white space

Rorke's Drift Linocut avoids generous white space: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
Surface from Rorke's Drift Linocut: Carved line

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Rorke's Drift Linocut

Vow

Agbalumo; Rorke's Drift Linocut used Hand-cut title in the block and Hand-cut captions and slogans

Text · Kinngait Inuit Printmaking

Prints from the Inuit co-operative studio at Kinngait (Cape Dorset), Nunavut, with a catalogued collection every year since 1959. Inuit artists draw; Inuit printmakers cut the drawing in stone or a stencil and print it by hand in editions of thirty (1959) and then fifty. A single figure, most often a bird or animal, floats as a flat silhouette in one to three inks on unprinted paper, and stencil daubing grades the colour inside it. This is the classic idiom; lithographs and etchings followed from the 1970s, and Annie Pootoogook, Shuvinai Ashoona and others have drawn contemporary Inuit life.

Caveat; Kinngait Inuit Printmaking used From the mid-1970s, the artist's pencil signature beneath the image, beside the title and an edition number such as 43/50 and Small carved chops of artist and printer, often cut from linoleum floor tile, stacked with the studio's mark in a vertical column in the margin of the stonecuts and stencils, as reproduced in the 1959 and 1960 catalogues

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Kinngait Inuit Printmaking, with a counter-accent from Rorke's Drift Linocut. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Kinngait (Cape Dorset) Inuit Printmaking Rorke's Drift Linocut

#f3efe3 ground · 36%
#1b1a17 ink · 14%
#b5352c accent · 18%
#d9cfb8 accent · 14%
#2c5a8c accent · 10%
#2f6a5a accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f3efe3;
  --ink: #1b1a17;
  --accent-1: #b5352c;
  --accent-2: #d9cfb8;
  --accent-3: #2c5a8c;
  --accent-4: #2f6a5a;
  --font-display: "Agbalumo", cursive;
  --font-text: "Caveat", cursive;
}

Use it with care

Kinngait (Cape Dorset) Inuit Printmaking: Kinngait printmaking is the living, collectively run art of an Inuit community, and its images belong to named Inuit artists and printmakers whose copyright the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative manages as their agent: license or commission work through the co-operative or Dorset Fine Arts rather than tracing a print. Borrow the system (a lone silhouette floating on open paper, one to three inks, stencil-graded colour, stone-cut edges), not a particular artist's owl, sun or hand. Do not invent Inuit spirit beings, shamans, the sea goddess or hunting rites as decoration; picture the subject the brief supplies. Never add a syllabic signature, artist's or printer's chops, the studio's mark, an edition number or the igloo authenticity symbol to generated work, and never present it as a Kinngait or Inuit print. Say 'Inuit', not 'Eskimo', except in historical names such as the co-operative's, and do not let Kinngait stand for all Inuit art: other communities, such as Qamani'tuaq (Baker Lake), have their own print studios and styles.

Rorke's Drift Linocut: These prints are the work of named Black South African and Namibian artists, many still in copyright with the artists or their estates, made under apartheid at a Lutheran mission centre. Rankin and Hobbs call the 'typical' Rorke's Drift print a construct that the market pushed artists to comply with; the centre also made etchings, aquatints, colour relief prints and screenprints, so treat this banded black-and-white linocut as one face of a diverse school, not the whole of it. Borrow the system (hand-cut black-and-white relief, banded narrative, words in the block), not a particular print, a named artist's figures or Muafangejo's lettering hand. Do not label generated work 'naive' or 'tribal' African art: when Clement Greenberg judged Art South Africa Today in 1975, Rorke's Drift artists were displayed in a 'catch all' section for representational and 'naive' works. Do not invent Zulu or Kwanyama ritual, Christian scenes or struggle martyrs as decoration: picture the subject the brief supplies in its own community's terms. Never add an artist's signature, edition number or a Rorke's Drift or ELC inscription to generated work, and never present a generated image as a Rorke's Drift print.

The two styles

A large stylized blue humpback whale angles upward to the right on a cream background, with cream throat stripes and spots and a gray tail. Red uppercase lettering at the top reads “RETURN.”

1957–present · North America Kinngait (Cape Dorset) Inuit Printmaking Prints from the Inuit co-operative studio at Kinngait (Cape Dorset), Nunavut, with a catalogued collection every year since 1959. Inuit artists draw; Inuit printmakers cut the drawing in stone or a stencil and print it by hand in editions of thirty (1959) and then fifty. A single figure, most often a bird or animal, floats as a flat silhouette in one to three inks on unprinted paper, and stencil daubing grades the colour inside it. This is the classic idiom; lithographs and etchings followed from the 1970s, and Annie Pootoogook, Shuvinai Ashoona and others have drawn contemporary Inuit life.

A black-and-cream, woodcut-style poster headed “GOOD WATER” shows four stacked scenes of villagers carrying water, working around wells, drinking, and tending crops beside round thatched houses. Decorative borders contain leaves, flowers, birds, fish, and wave patterns.

1962–1982 · Sub-Saharan Africa Rorke's Drift Linocut The prints of the Lutheran art centre that Swedish teachers Peder and Ulla Gowenius started at Ceza Hospital in 1962 and moved to Rorke's Drift in 1963: under apartheid, which denied Black South Africans formal fine-art education, the chief training ground for many Black artists. Azaria Mbatha, John Muafangejo, Charles Nkosi and others cut black-and-white linocuts of Bible stories, Zulu and Kwanyama history and daily life, often crowded into horizontal bands with every gap filled by figures, foliage and pattern. Muafangejo added titles, dedications and commentary in the print itself.

More combinations

With Kinngait Inuit Printmaking

With Rorke's Drift Linocut

Every style combination