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.