Somuk

[5] In January 1935, Somuk encountered Patrick O'Reilly, a French Catholic priest who had been trained in ethnology and dispatched to the Solomon Islands and New Guinea to collect materials for the Musée de l'Homme in Paris.

[6] O'Reilly cultivated Somuk as an informant and encouraged him to depict cultural stories on paper, supplying him with ink and coloured pencils.

[8] Somuk refused to work as a plantation labourer, unlike many others, and instead earned a living by farming, performing church duties and selling his artwork.

[4] O'Reilly recalled him as a "Solomonese dandy", who wore a non-traditional calico lavalava, a necklace made of bats' teeth, and stained his hair with ochre.

[11] His depictions of humans, animals and plants are characterised by the use of silhouetted figures rendered in black crayon, which have been linked to a pre-colonial style found widely on Buka.

It has been suggested that his drawings of traditional clothing and tools can be "interpreted as an attempt to preserve the Solos peoples' ceremonies that were being interrupted and overtaken".

One crayon drawing shows Indigenous workers wearing lap-laps undertaking forced labour under Japanese supervisors, likely depicting the construction of an airfield.