Female Whale and Baby Whale

This low-relief red cedar panel by Coast Salish artist Darrin Thomas presents a female whale and her calf in profile, swimming across a horizontal, rounded-corner field. The carver works in the formline vocabulary of Northwest Coast design: the whales’ bodies are built from swelling ovoids, crescent shapes and tapering U-forms, with the larger form on the left anchored by a heavy dorsal fin and an open, toothed mouth, and the smaller calf on the right tilted upward in a lively, ascending diagonal. Dark, incised and stained negative spaces describe the fins, eyes and joints, and contrast with the warm, honeyed amber of the polished cedar, which still shows its natural grain and gives the surface a quiet, rippling movement like water.