The Kmhmu Highlands

Kmhmu
14 x 11 inches, oil on canvas, 2019

The image here was sourced from the cover of the cd Bamboo on the Mountains (Smithsonian, 1999.) The original photo was taken by Frank Proschan in the Song Khwae district of northern Nan in Thailand in 1996. The teum singing by Ya' Ak ang Ya' Seu Keodaeng the painting represents comes from the same district as the source photo but the woman most likely isn't either of them. (Two other musicians from the same photograph—there's five of individuals—I've painted before to represent the same song. I'm again not quite sure concerning the gender of any of them.) The recording was made by Proschan in 1992. The symmetry of the painting is neither around a vertical axis nor a horizontal axis but is both, a diagonal axis perhaps. As in a playing card you can turn the painting around to get the same image. I played around with this concept first in a stencil print of Alvin Lucier and I will experiment further on this concept. Possibilities galore but not enough to create a full deck.

Inuktitut

Mary Sivuaraapik and Audia throat singing

14 x 11 inches, oil on canvas, 2019

The track Katajjait on "Hamma" features three examples of katajjait, traditional game songs of the Inuit. The word "hamma" is a syllable of the Inuktitut language, the songs represented have no words but play on the sound of hamma. The songs appear on Canada: Inuit Games and Songs on UNESCO. The performers, in order of appearance: Elijah Pudloo Mageeta, Tamegeak Pitaulassie, Marie Apaqaq, Soria Eyituk, and Napache Semaejuk Pootoogook. Recorded in Baffin Land at Cape Dorset and Sanikiluaq between 1973 and 1975 by Nicole Beaudry and Claude Charron. Katajjait are secular song but were banned by encroaching Christianity for a hundred years. Many cultural traditions Inuit have disappeared and exist only in museums and literature but katajjaq vocal games somehow survived and are now practiced widely in Nunavut, the semi-autonomous state under Inuit rule in Northern Canada.

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Intersex

Cover of Sibérie 8, Évenk (Savelij Vasilev?)

oil on canvas, 2019

Je chevanche mon rêne (I'm riding my reins) is a traditional Évenk folk song from the "narrative song" section on the cd Sibérie 8, Évenk: Chants rituels des nomades de la taiga on Buda Records by Henri Lecomte. The Evenks have been living on their ancestral lands in the south of Siberia near the Mongolian border since neolithic times. The culture is shamanistic and remains so to this day. Depicted is an Évenk shaman who appears on the cover of the cd as photographed by Lecomte. Since five out of six recordings in the section "shamanic chants" are of Savelij Vasilev I must assume it is he. While working on this painting for some but no particular reason I was uncertain about the gender of the individual. The same uncertainty has come upon me a number of times in recent months, enough so that I must ask myself questions: Does it even matter which gender an individual belongs to? Does the gender of an individual influence how I paint? Why does this question even come up and how does it reflect me? A number of associations come to mind when attempting answers. First is my approach to painting. I usually aim for a personality to come through, a person's spirit. The race of a person is often ambiguous in this process—I paint a person of color with the same colors and intend as I do non-colored—thus it would only make sense the same approach is used in the issue of gender. Perhaps a person's gender isn't as important to me as it once was; getting older and producing less testosterone may just take away the sexual aspect when considering an individual. I believe that genders aren't as binary as culture conceives. That any individual has a certain masculinity as well as femininity, that there is a spectrum within which each of us occupies at different times different places. That no individual at any time as it the very extreme of this spectrum. (Genghis Khan perhaps approached ultimate masculinity.) The shaman, in cultures around the world, is often preordained because of ideosyncrasies of character, including gender ambiguity. The shaman becomes a shaman because of an even distribution of feminine and masculine aspects. The male shaman could recite in falsetto while the female shaman could use the technique of throat singing (a technique where there's no distinction in gender characteristics.) Shamanism is not gender specific in the same way early childhood and perhaps old age isn't gender specific either. While painting the male shaman here the melody of the folk song by Oktjabrina Vladimirovna and Svetlana Naumeva (who sing with distinct feminine voices) continued to be in the back of my head.

Throat singing in the shower

Dumagat woman and child 

14 x 11 inches, oil on canvas, 2019

"While singing, the Dumagat woman in this recording vibrated her throat with her hand" are the liner notes to the Dumagat Throat Song by David Blair Stiffler on Music from the Mountain Provinces (Numerophone 2012). The record was intended to be released on Folkways but while recording it founder and director Moses Asch had died. There are a great many throat songs on the year's Top 100 list and I've tried to imitate some but I can't get the particular breathing done. Little did I know that I had performed, as a youngster, the kind of throat singing described by Stiffler all along. I never practiced much as because it's a painful technique and each performance only lasted 20 seconds at most. The recording on the Dumagat lasts for one minute and nineteen seconds and must have been so painful, unless I did it all wrong or Dumagat throats are stronger than mine. The mountain provinces in question are situated in the Philippines where Stiffler recorded in between 1986 and 1988.

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