Where some people might store kayaks and tent-camping gear during winter, and skis or sleds all summer, Eaton’s art materials occupy space. Each block of wood—most are from spruce stumps—needs to age three years before being carved.
Why stumps?
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Two of the most striking elements of Perry Eaton’s Alutiiq masks are his use of measured, symmetrical forms and the fact that the wood grain shows through his paints. “I paint. I put color. But I don’t house paint,” Eaton says. He’s halfway up a flight of stairs to show off his carving studio above the garage. “That’s the sort of paint I like—where you’ve got good color but you can still see the grain,” he says.
Eaton has been an art photographer, a machinist, a banker and a corporate board member. He was born in Kodiak and raised in Seattle. Summers on Kodiak Archipelago meant an education in small boat fishing from his father. “It was great for a kid. You run around loose—there were no women. You grew up on the docks with men, and you learned to work. You had to carry your own weight,” Eaton says.
He retired from a corporate job at Alyeska Pipeline three years ago to work on art full time. He was a human resources manager, and a corporate relations specialist working with Alaska Native corporations that own land the oil pipeline crosses.
In hiring a leader from Kodiak with experience at Koniag, Inc., the pipeline company got a man well known for his ability to manage boardroom relationships—to pick battles appropriately, bury the hatchet or recognize common ground.
“He taught me a lot of those nuances,” says Sven Haakanson Jr., the executive director at Alutiiq Museum in Kodiak. “He’s taught me how to work with a board and how to make things move forward in a good way.”
Eaton’s also known as a stern taskmaster. In the studio he talks about striving for excellence while describing mask carving. He studies the wood blocks carefully for grain patterns. He’s adopted measuring tools from his machinist days at Boeing Aircraft in Seattle. He carefully maps features—say, the eyes, nose and beak of a bird/man spirit—into the wood so the grain patterns complement the finished shapes.
On a wall in Eaton’s kitchen downstairs, there’s a mask carved by Haakanson that’s purposefully asymmetrical and comic. The mask is part teasing, part critique, as if poking fun at the taskmaster for being so picky about art.
“I could never carve a straight enough line for him—so that was me, carving the way I want to carve,” Haakanson says.
“I don’t think I ever learned it,” Eaton says of carving. “It was just always there.” His current portfolio includes photos of masks going back to 2003, and a steady stream of masks since.
He calls his work “tradition-based” and, collectively, his carvings are based on artifact masks held in collections in France and Russia. Eaton, Haakanson and Anchorage-based painter Helen Simeonoff are three of the people who have been instrumental in taking Suqpiaq and Alutiiq artists to visit those collections.
Eaton currently serves on Koniag’s board. He had a meeting Friday, in fact. Then Sunday he flew off to France, to meet with gallery owners who want to exhibit his masks. Simeonoff has known Eaton about a decade, and says one part of him doesn’t change. He is perpetually on the move.
“I actually don’t catch him that much, because he’s always getting on a plane or getting off a plane,” Simeonoff says. “He stays connected to the people that way—that makes him really busy.”
Simeonoff turns 70 next year. She began painting in watercolors as an adult in the 1980s. After years of work she was selling art with some success in the early 1990s—before she began exploring her Suqpiaq heritage. That’s partly because much of the Kodiak’s Native culture exists solely in off-island collections. It’s a wrinkle of history that at first blush seems unlikely in Alaska, where the Tlingit, Yupik, and Inupiaq cultures are known for preserving continual threads of art, music and food culture, even centuries after contact with whites.
Why wouldn’t this also be true for Alutiiq culture?
“We rejected it,” Eaton says, explaining that many Suqpiaq families had already intermarried with Russians before Americans arrived. Under the new American territory, people known as “creole” came to be called “half breeds” and Native identity was shunned. “My grandmother taught us to use only English words in her house,” Eaton says, “She would even correct me.”
He says many families on Kodiak have had internal, generations-long conversations about whether to identify themselves as Native. The assimilation-driven society that evolved after Russians left, Eaton believes, did more to suppress the culture than the Russians ever did.
Simeonoff remembers looking up the word “renaissance” the first time she heard Eaton use it in conversation. Simeonoff didn’t travel in Alaska Native corporate circles. She didn’t know Eaton until the late 1990s. The carver sought her out after she took a trip to Boulogne-sur-Mer, in northern France, to see a collection of masks, clothing, tools and other artifacts collected in the 1870s. A linguist and anthropologist named Louise-Alphonse Pinart collected the artifacts from Kodiak villages, but few Alaskans knew of its existence.
Simeonoff learned of the Pinart collection while attending a lecture in Alaska. She was moved by the images in an anthropologist’s slide presentation. On her first trip she was just a tourist. She may have been the first Suqpiaq person to seek out the collection in more than 100 years (she was certainly one of very few), but Simeonoff had no special access to Pinart’s archive. She returned with only a few pictures, and only of the artifacts on display in galleries at the museum.
Still, when she came back to Alaska, there was this guy seeking her out. He was a well-connected Native man from Koniag, Inc., who was perpetually busy. He seemed to want befriend her, and seemed purposefully humble. It took a while for Simeonoff—a woman who says, “I don’t know how friendships start, they just do”—to trust Eaton’s humility as genuine.
“At first, he didn’t indicate why he was calling. I was busy trying to keep my art career afloat, so, you know, you have to carve out time for things,” she says. “Finally he says, ‘well, I heard you’ve been to France to photograph the Pinart collection.’”
In the last decade, Koniag, Inc. and Alutiiq Museum have teamed up to send Suqpiaq and Alutiiq artists on trips to France to see the Pinart collection in person. Access was granted and cases were opened. Artists were able to touch and inspect a cultural heritage most had never seen, except in pictures. They were able to inspect things that Simeonoff only saw behind glass on her first visit. And Eaton has learned to carve tradition-based masks that are both recognizable in style and honored with arts awards.
Along the way, Koniag has paid for publication of two photo books featuring the Pinart collection (Two Journeys and Giinaquq: Like a Face) and Eaton’s hope is that they help sustain the renaissance.
In his carving studio, Eaton opens a copy of Like a Face and proudly shows off how each mask is depicted from several angles. It’s like a manual, he says, the reader can see how deep the cuts in a brow line are, or the height and length of a nose in three dimensions. “My hope is that this sits on a table in Old Harbor, and if ten or 20 years from now a kid decides he wants to carve a mask he can open this up and see,” he says. “It’s something that I didn’t have.”
Simeonoff says she has seen Eaton at his most humble, when one of his masks was worn in a dance performance and then sold at a benefit auction for Koahnic, the nonprofit that operates radio station KNBA in Anchorage. Eaton, who had already proven himself in photography and boardrooms, was selling a mask. He was as nervous as an emerging artist could be. Simeonoff remembers her friend standing near the back of the room and seeming as if he were weak in the knees.
“It’s like selling your soul. It’s like putting your guts out there. You don’t know if they are going to accept it, or reject it, or say, ‘What is that?,’” she says. “He about keeled over—the mask went for something like 15 thousand dollars… He was reeling. He was absolutely in shock.”
She’s also spent time with Eaton in the carving studio. She tried carving herself, but decided it was not her medium after accidentally cutting herself. Instead, she’d spend time just watching Eaton and admiring the patience and care he took to get things right. “The thing about his work that I find intriguing is that right when you see it, you know that it is top drawer,” she says.
“You don’t hide the wood, you let the wood kind of like talk to you. I think that’s the reason that I connect to Perry’s masks,” Simeonoff says. She’s watched him carefully measure and plan before carving and set the stain just right with the paint. “He would paint it on and he would leave it until the moment when it was just before it was too dry, and then he wipes it off.”
The finished work often has wood grain that completes the features carved in the mask. A mask without cut-in eyebrows, for example, might have arched wood grain lines just above the eye. Other masks have grains that evoke hair, shadows, or cheek blush, even the texture of human skin or a bird’s beak. This is what Simeonoff admires most. “If you miss that part, you’ve missed his mask,” she says.
She describes her Eaton as a “deep thinker. “He thinks about the someone context of things,” she says. “Perry’s retired from the oil companies, so now he is spending his time furthering Suqpiaq art—and I know this is not just for him. We are in our renaissance period. We are having to study, we are having to take trips abroad… That’s what Koniag is working on now, getting our reference material for our children.”
scott@anchoragepress.com
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