Twok

Bald, flute-playing Artist Rockwell Kent last week rushed excitedly into the Weyhe Gallery, his Manhattan dealers, with two rolls of scraped sealskin and a story: he had discovered the greatest of Eskimo artists, he had two examples of his work to prove it.

"If there is another Eskimo that can draw half as well," said Artist Kent, "I don't know of his existence. I know for a fact that nothing produced in Greenland is even comparable. Ranking with all comers he certainly is one of the foremost of artists who have drawn in the North. On more specific grounds I would cite for their special excellence his perspective, his action, his strong sense of both the pictorial and dramatic impact, and above all, the values in his comprehensive epic of Eskimo life."

Artist Kent's protege is a 25-year-old Alaskan named George Aden Ahgupuk, better known as Twok. As a child in a mission school in northwestern Alaska he was in constant hot water with his teachers for covering valuable sheets of paper with walruses, kyacks, reindeer and seagulls, but Eskimo Twok never thought of being a professional artist until a hunting accident put him in a hospital for a year, left him crippled for life. Twok moved to Noorvik, Alaska, began drawing the daily life of his people on sheets of reindeer and sealskin parchment that he scraped himself during the winter months. But Artist Twok does not use the primitive picture writing of his people. His drawing is western, modeled painstakingly after the art in U. S. magazines lent him by white settlers. Artist Kent is far from being Twok's first patron. Credit chiefly belongs to a Mrs. Oliver Weaver, wife of a public utilities executive in Nome, who has been circulating and selling original Twoks for several years.

Both of the representative Twoks that reached Manhattan last week showed scenes of the most exciting event in the Eskimo year: the reindeer roundup into the communal corral. Dogs are chasing reindeer, Eskimos are wrestling with stray stags, animals are galloping wildly and villagers are slipping, sliding and shouting.

Impressed, the American Artists Group elected Twok a full-fledged member last week, shipped him pens, ink, drawing paper and lithographic stones.

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