Chukchi Shaman

Chukchi Shaman
8.5" x 6.5"
oil on wood, 2011

I'm quite pleased with this tiny little painting of a Chukchi shaman playing his drum sitting by some palm trees at Billie's Creek that runs behind my house. It got a spot on my wall directly next to my last Siberian shaman painting that I did precisely ten years ago. Certain genetic theories have it that about 13,000 years ago a group of less than twenty Chukchi crossed what is now the Bering Street into America. They are the ancestors of the native Americans who spread as far south as South America. So this Chukchi shaman of Arctic Siberia may well have a similar genetic code as Billie Bowlegs, the Seminole after whom the creek was named and who might have very well been sitting once at the very spot as where I placed the shaman in the painting. On YouTube there exists a beautiful film of a shamanic Chukchi musical performance. Click on the link below to watch it. If you decide to do so please watch it until the end because the last thirty seconds features a very intriguing type of breathing-singing that made the recording propel into Top 100 land.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JJw5bTfUL8