Allen Smutylo
Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013
Reviewed by Rob Muylwyk
It must have been around 2004 that I was first exposed to the fine artwork of Allen Smutylo, in this case a colourful etching of an arctic kayak, nicely framed and appropriately hung over the mantel of the GLSKA president of the time. He and his partner happened to walk into the Circle Arts Gallery in Tobermory following a kayak trip in Fathom Five National Marine Park and decided that they could not go home without it. As Smutylo describes in the second chapter of this collection of ten memoirs, he was one of a group of Toronto expat artists that founded Circle Arts in the late sixties. More than forty years later, the gallery still carries his work. Around the time that we moved up to the Bruce Peninsula, Allen was presenting a series of slide shows and talks based on his trips to the High Arctic. Much of the material presented in the slide show is repeated here, so that it can reach a much wider public.
Water is supposed to be the common thread through the stories. This may seem a bit artificial; to me the common thread is how the writer utilizes each destination to paint small watercolour sketches, which he will later use in his studio to produce the larger etchings and chine collées and his superb oil paintings. He applies this method regardless of whether he is travelling in the Canadian Arctic, Greenland, Maui or Varenasi, India.
But it doesn’t really matter how the stories connect, as they are all very interesting. They don’t all use the same style, as some are full of sparkling humour (such as the trip in his first kayak through Owen Sound’s Sydenham River while trying not to get entangled in the lines of the many fishermen along the river; or the story about bridging wide cultural schisms between the Tobermory locals and the urban hippy artists). Other stories are more serious, describing the various people that over time have moved through the Arctic: the Independence people (2500 to 500 BCE), the Paleo-Eskimo Dorsets (50 BCE to 1000 CE), the Thule people (1000 to 1700 CE), and finally the current Inuit. Allen finds traces of some of these cultures in the landscape, such as tent rings.
Some of the stories are educational for us kayakers as there are descriptions of dangerous and unwise decisions being made. During his first kayak trip in the Arctic his guide takes off a day early and the now unguided clients disagree on how to stay out of dangerously wild water, which in the end becomes almost a choice between drowning or being eaten by a pack of hungry sled dogs. More traditional encounters with polar bears and a threatening walrus are featured as well. These encounters are described in two chapters about paddling around Bylot Island (now part of Sirmilik National Park), north of Baffin Island with a very rough 600-kilometre shoreline, impossible to land on for long stretches. During these trips adventurer Mike Beedell and Smutylo have to deal with another major threat: hunger, as their food drops had been raided by bears.
The book is superbly illustrated with good reproductions of Allen’s beautiful etchings, water colours and oils, but somewhat limited because of the small format of the book. This is in contrast with his previous, prize winning, book, Wild Places, Wild Hearts: Nomads of the Himalaya. It is in a coffee table format with large reproductions. Allen told me that the reason for going to the smaller format was that the previous book had mostly been thumbed through as a picture book, while with this one he wanted to emphasize the writing. Personally I had no problem reading the Himalaya book cover-to-cover, as Allen’s insights, acquired by living among the nomads, were very much worth a read. And so is this book. Even though not all stories are kayak-centered I highly recommend this book to our members.