Henri Lecomte

Henri Lecomte
14 x 11 inches, oil on canvas, 2019

Anna Dimitrievna Neostroeva 
14 x 11 inches, oil on canvas, 2018

Henri Lecomte (1938-2018) died last year. I just figured that out while searching for biographical data on him. Darn, last year I painted and wrote about another French ethnomusicologist Charles Duvelle, he had just passed away in 2017 and I didn't even know it then. Henri Lecomte (Google keeps thinking I misspelled his name and I'm searching for the tennis star Henri Leconte) was, beside his work in the field, also a musician and director. He played a host of instruments among them many traditional central Asian ones. The last thirty years of his life were dedicated to research into the music of the Arctic Siberian regions. He wrote a number of papers on the subject and his series of cd releases simply called Siberia consists of eleven volumes, all released on Buda Music (Musique de Monde) between 1991 and 2009. They're hard to get by. I have two (plus some downloads of individual tracks from other discs in the series) both ordered via amazon.fr. In front of me lies Volume 3 dedicated to the Kolyma (Chants de nature et d'animaux) which features musicians with Čukč (Chukchi), Even, and Jukaghir backgrounds. The disc is from 1995. There are seven recordings made by Henri Lecomte in the Top 100 this year, as there were last year. One of these is a throat song by Anna Neostroeva who is Chukchi. I painted her last Fall but never posted it on these pages. The source photo was taken by Lecomte. There are still a handful of older paintings waiting to be uploaded here. I never posted on the painting I did last year (when he was still alive) of Lecomte either. The image can be seen at #43 in the post that shows thumbnails of all 100 paintings from the last year's list. This one is better.