Andrew Dexel Enpaauk Prints

Andrew Dexel Enpaauk is a young artist from the Nlakapamux Nation. Native Art Prints has been carrying his work for several years now, and it sells very well since his style mixes graffiti style with Coast Salish design. This fusion creates figurative and abstract images that speak to resistance and renewal. He began creating limited edition prints soon after establishing his unique style.

His beginnings as a graffiti artist is central to his style and since his switch from walls to canvas in 2007 he has brought this energy from the streets into his paintings. His work was featured in Kamloops Art Gallery's exhibition Shazam in 2009 and he also had the pleasure doing a solo show titled Gratitude at Vancouver's Grunt Gallery. 

His work is also featured at Vancouver's Lattimer Gallery and the Native Winds Gallery in Honolulu. He also had a showing of new works at Lattimer Gallery in 2010. Around this same period, Andrew painted a 7 1/2-foot fiberglass sculpture for Vancouver's public art project titled 'Eagles in the City'.

Early Northwest Coast Print Innovators

Printmaking is definitely not a traditional art form amongst First Nations cultures in the Pacific Northwest. Steam-bending wood, painting, and carving have always been common activities within Native communities here on the West Coast but lithographs, silkscreening, and etching...not so much. In the early 1960s - as artists such as Robert Davidson (Haida), David Gladstone (Heiltsuk), and Earl Muldon (Gitxsan) were completing major projects to revitalize their cultural art forms - screenprinting was introduced to First Nations artists as an affordable way to encourage aesthetic experimentation and market the art. Northwest Coast Native design is two-dimensional and based on formline composition to begin with, so the transition from traditional forms to printed paper was logical. The early years of Northwest Coast printmaking were incredibly successful as artists were producing both formal, conventional works and progressive, unconventional works. These prints were often made as limited editions of several hundred, so they entered the market at reasonable price points as well.

Native Art Prints makes an effort to acquire these early and innovative prints, as they are becoming rarer and rarer. Here are some of our favourites:

This print is titled Robin's Egg and was produced by Gitksan artist Phil Janze in 1981. Still producing to this day, Janze is an innovator in design and jewellery who works with unusual motifs and materials. In this charming piece, Janze has used both an atypical symbol and colour. Breaking away from strict Northwest Coast formline design, he has illustrated the baby robin in negative space and confined the design within the shape of an egg. This creates a spatial tension in the piece, which is deceptively complex.

This print by Donnie Yeomans is from 1979 and is enigmatically titled A White Finger Pointing to the Moon. One initially views the shape of the design as a whole to be the so-called 'finger' in the title of the piece...but this finger is black. We view the black in this piece to represent the night sky, with the small white tri-neg at the bottom of the piece to be the finger pointing upwards. The moon is in blue and red, and has been personified as is common with sun and moon figures in Northwest Coast art. This classic print is priced at $300.00 at Native Art Prints.

Now deceased, Carrier artist Larry Rosso is perhaps best known for his deeply-carved and carefully-crafted bentwood boxes. However, he also produced a variety of sophisticated and abstracted limited edition prints. This piece, Elements II, is open to interpretation: it can be read as an eagle figure (with the red u-form representing the beak), a large angular salmon head design, or simply shapes from the Northwest Coast lexicon. This piece is from a small edition of 107 and acts as a wonderful reminder of Larry's great contributions to this art form.

Northwest Coast Indian Artists Guild Series 1977

The 1977 Northwest Coast Indian Artists Guild Series was one of the first projects and publications on contemporary Northwest Coast design. Native Art Prints is constantly striving to attain prints from this series to pass on to our customers. Originally released at the Vancouver Art Gallery and promoted through a catalogue produced by the federal Canadian Indian Marketing Services, the guild graphics collection was generated and organized by the artists themselves.

The series included graphic artists such as Robert Davidson, Joe David, Gerry Marks, and Francis Williams who are now considered to be amongst the best designers of modern Northwest Coast Art. Many of the prints included in this collection were identified as iconic soon after publication. Screen-printing programs were offered during the early years at the Gitanmaax School of Northwest Coast art in Hazelton and established an interest among the artists and the potential for prints in the emerging market. For the first few years, because of the insignificant values the prints were being sold for, the artists were producing very large editions. Over time, galleries replaced tourist shops and graphics began to earn a respected position in the fine art market - and the artists began to realize that the only way to make the art collectable was to make smaller editions.

The Guild Series was produced in small editions on archival paper and played with grander scale images. In the words of Robert Davidson: “It was time to take prints from the back bedroom to the living room.” Native Art Prints has the above print - Raven-Finned Killerwhale by Robert Davidson - available for sale. A second series of prints was released in 1978 which did very well, and a third was released in 1979. These three publication projects established printmaking as a standard mode of production for First Nations artists on the West Coast.