excerpt
Back to the Arctic
After a year of hard labour that gave Ken’s hands countless blisters
and made his wrists so sore he had trouble sleeping at night, he finished
stretching all thirty-eight canvases for Isumataq. With Diane’s help he
erected the panels two feet out from the concrete wall of the studio, each
panel held in place by a cross beam. The white panels stretched one hundred
fifty-two feet across the white wall. Ken cleared almost everything
out of the studio except for the Reichmann painting, which he placed
against the wall behind the canvases, and the Yellowknife Airport painting,
which he placed on the opposite wall.
For Ken, the studio became a sacred space, where he swore that if he
listened hard enough he could hear angels singing. The door from the
framing shop opened behind the thirty-eight panels with an immediate
view to the only other thing in the room: the giant Inukshuk.
Now that the canvases were erected, Ken contemplated the complete
work for the first time and what he saw almost overwhelmed him. The
scope of the work he had set for himself was nearly inconceivable to grasp.
First, there was the immense challenge of scaling up the model. One at
a time he took a salient feature from the smaller painting and measured
from one end to the other on both canvases, making dots with comments
to remind himself of what the marks meant. Every two inches had to be
measured and marked – horizontally and vertically.
It was the most laborious job he had ever done in his life and he could
only work at it for three or four hours each day. His concentration disintegrated
if he tried to stay with the work longer than that and he would
begin to make mistakes. Each morning the work began again, making
point, point, point and points. It was an exercise in patience that at times
came close to driving him mad. But it had to be done.
One day, when he had reached his limit, he sat back with a beer and
contemplated his work. Endless though it seemed he felt satisfied and
happy. It was actually happening. It had been a mere idea – and here it
was – it was real.
Then it occurred to him. How was he going to paint the damn thing?
He’d already had trouble with the sky in his last two large paintings…
Libros Libertad 