Mark E Smith, 1957-2018

Mark E Smith
Oil on board, 7.25 x 7 inches, 2018

The Greatest Blues Song

Elvie Thomas
2 x 2 feet, oil on panel, 2018

In April of 2013 a remarkable article appeared in the New York Times. It is the story of a journalist, Jeremiah Sullivan, who traced and identified the two women responsible for the song Last Kind Word Blues. The song, recorded in 1930, had mesmerized blues aficionados the world over, but who the musicians Geechie Wiley and L.V. Thomas were, nobody really knew. That song, Last Kind Word Blues, my number one in the Top 100 1999, I have now decided is the greatest blues song ever recorded, inching out Prisoner's Talking Blues by Robert Pete Williams, Hellhound on My Trail by Robert Johnson, and I Be's Trouble by McKinley Morganfield (Muddy Waters.) The painting I'm working on is not much different from one I did before. It's from the only known photo that exist of Elvie Thomas (1891-1979). The photo was taken by Robert "Mack" McCormick, who had spent a good deal of life investigating the identities of the performers. John Jeremiah Sullivan then started his research where McCormick left off. Geeshie (as it should be spelled) Wiley (1908-after mid 1950s) is Lilly Mae Scott, no photograph of her ever surfaced. After meticulously painting Wiley's portrait from that one photo, I was at a loss of how to proceed with that great open space left on the panel. I had ideas before I started but each was rejected in the process. I felt frustrated, angered, and anxious about it and angrily filled in the white spaces. Rather than going back into it and 'fix' these negative emotions I figured I'd leave it, at least for now.

Inuit Throat Singing: Katajjait

Celina Kalluk and Tanya Tagaq
24 x 18 inches, oil on canvas, 2018

Celina Kalluk and Tanya Tagaq are two of today's best known Inuit throat singers. Katajjait (the plural of katajjaq) are throat songs usually performed by two women. A number of these songs have entered the current top 100 list. I've listened to many performances by both Kalluk and Tagaq (they are cousins) but most katajjait in top 100 are by anonymous performers. The painting initially was not meant to be of musicians but rather an exercise in a purely intuitive approach to painting in which I practice to not reject any thought that comes up in my head during the process. When first faced with the blank canvas, deliberating the first brush marks, our cat decided to hang out in my studio. Not rejecting the thought, I painted her.

Vagina Dentata

Tattooed Ainu woman
9.5 x 6 inches, oil on board, 2018

Tattooed Ainu woman
9.5 x 6 inches, oil on board, 2018

From the Koryak of Kamchatka to the Ainu of Hokkaido, the top 100 continues to locate itself in Northeastern Asia. It's a long 810 mile boat ride but it can be done by hopping the 56 islands of the Kuril chain. It'll be a beautiful boat ride but rather cold. And while you're hopping and dressed for the cold you can continue to hop the Aleutian Islands and arrive in Alaska and you take a train to Fairbanks and from there (I wouldn't know how) to Canada's Arctic Bay which will be the next destination of the top 100. The route follows the trail of female throat singing duets. I've made the journeyat home through cds in warm and cozy Florida: Japan: Ainu Songs on Unesco (Musiques et musiciens du monde), Sibérie 4, Korjak, Kamchatka: Tambours de danse de l'extrême orient-sibérien (Musique du monde), and Canada: Jeux vocaux des Inuit (Inuit du Caribou, Netsilik et Igloolik). I've painted Ainu women before back in 2006. I remember commenting on the hairy features of the Ainu people. I've read that the Ainu are indeed obsessed with hair and the characteristic women's tattoos represent mustaches. A facebook friend posted some pictures recently and commented: "The lips lips look like labia. Women adapted this look to lure men to oral sex in order to keep from getting pregnant every year. This is just the theory of an uninformed idiot. I’m not an anthropologist." (Thank you Barbara) I love this interpretation! The vagina dentata, one of Jung's archetypes, metaphorically designates the Freudian fear of castration.

Koryak (2)

Tamara Ivikovna Sajnav (cover image of Sibérie 4)
20 x 16 inches, oil on canvas, 2018

The 'Music du Monde' cd Kamchatka: Tambours de danse de l'extreme-orient Sibérien featuring music by the Koryak continues to be loaded in the cd-drive of my computer. It's becoming a sing-along disc. The language used by Tamara Ivikovna Sajnav on a song about the tundra is Čavčuven, which belongs to the Paleo-Siberian family. Needless to say that I don't know what I'm singing about when I sing along (besides that it's about the tundra). The musicians are not very forthcoming when asked about lyrics, they argue that the meaning of the song is in the timbre, not in their words. I agree. (I never pay attention to the meaning of song lyrics much, never did. When I sing "hop-hop" along with the disc, I think I understand the song.) With song, as with image, a deeper understanding is gained in the process of copying. In copying the cover image of the cd, the photograph of Sajnav (probably taken by Henri Lecomte, who also recorded the music) a level of empathy is established. Tamara Ivikovna Sajnav was born in 1928 in Aklan, her Koryak name is Ejgili, which means small stone. She is a small woman with a big drum (zja zjaj frame drum), 65 years old when the photo was taken. Her face in the painting was done with just a few brush strokes and looks younger than in the photo. I left it that way.

The Koryak of Kamchatka

Irina Khristoforvna and Anna Vasilevna Kolegova
16 x 20 inches, oil on canvas, 2018

Kamchatka, the far eastern peninsula of Russia, is mighty close to America. Despite the supposed isolation of native Americans since the last ice age (c. 13,000 BCE), the cultures on either side of the Bering Sea have much in common. No surprise then that the Koryak, natives of Kamchatka, have a competition song tradition quite similar to that of their Inuit neighbors in Canada. Compared to native Americans the history of native Siberians is one of coexistence going back to Viking times. Not to say that Siberian (shamanic) traditional cultures weren't threatened in their existence, far from it. As Russians before the Revolution were perhaps more homogeneous as a people than the Americans were, the Communist Soviet period took homogeneity to a further extreme. The villages of far northern and eastern Siberia were considered useless to the Soviet agenda and its people were systematically displaced, villages were closed, and their traditional way of life persecuted. Shamans went in hiding. Just before the new year I received the cd Sibérie 4, Korjak, Kamchatka: Tambours de danse de l'extrême orient-sibérien in the mail. The ordering was quite an ordeal as no English language sites seem to have the item in stock. From the cd, the Chant de compétition, performed by Irina Khristoforovna Kolegova and Ana Vasilevna Kolegova, is the last top 100 entry of 2017. The list now, I decided, continues to run through 2018.