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When The Season Is Good: Movie Analysis

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The film When the Season is Good: Artists of Artic Alaska follows four different artists as they create and sell their art to support themselves. Each artist has a particular medium that they like to work with and all of them use parts of the natural world within their art. Each artist is given a little over fifteen minutes of film, and suprsingly one learns a lot about their family, craft, and lifestyles in the short amount of time allotted. By talking about their art and how they came to be artists, all of the artists connected their art back to family tradition. The first artist is an ivory carver from St. Lawrence Island. The only way he has made money since 1992 is through selling his work. It has become his only source of income. He …show more content…

She has a master in Fine Arts from University of Arizona. After going away for school, she realized that she missed the land and her family too much to stay away from Alaska, which is why she stays even though she feels a bit removed from the “serious art world.” She is a painter and sculptor who incorporates natural items into her work. She feels like her work represents her as a holistic person, not just representative of her Alaskan native culture. She talks about how in the summer her family would go to their gold mine each summer to mine together. She believes that experiences like gold mining and other parts of her childhood and family life show up in her work. In her paintings she creates a skin like surface with layers of acrylic paint. She also uses items like hair and walrus stomach to add dimension. She is interested in different layers and creating a “physical history” in her …show more content…

He is from King Island, a primarily subsistence community but lives in Nome, Alaska now. He left the island in his early twenties. More and more people left the island and the Bureau of Indian Affairs closed down the school there. Sylvester is a sculptor who also uses ivory in his pieces. His whole family carved ivory and he is continuing the tradition by teaching his son. He also teaches the boy to fish and how to filet the fish after it has been caught. Once he got bored with carving ivory, he took a class at the university that led him to experiment with different materials, like hardwoods and aluminum. This caused his art to become more abstract. He started to make different types of masks from different regions of Alaska, even making mobiles out of some of them. By teaching his son both traditional ways and emphasizing having a good college education, Sylvester hopes to help his son, “function better in both

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