Amazons / High Risk

Description

I created this oil painting in 1975 when I was living in the eastern foothills of the Cascades, on a piece of canvas tent i found in the city dump. At that time I was intensively researching Central Asia, including the Turkic Amazons traditions. The Amazons described by the Greeks – the Libyan Amazons and the Black Sea Amazons – are only part of the story. Turkic peoples of central Asia had their own Amazon traditions. In a Karakalpak epic, the wise maiden Gulaim refused marriage and lived in a fortress with her forty maidens, defending the land from an invading shah. Further northeast in Siberia, olonkho epics of the Yakut tell of women warriors called d’ege baba.

Burials of Sauromatian women warriors have been found on the Eurasian steppe, the Caucasus region, and and in Central Asia. Herodotus described the Sauromatians as descendants of the Amazons. In the 5th century BCE, at Pokrovka on the border of Kazakhstan, as many as 14% of burials were females equipped with various weapons.

I named the painting “Amazons: High Risk” because it became the cover for a 45 recorded by the L.A. women’s funk band High Risk in 1976. One of the earliest women’s music releases, it featured Sandy Ajida on drums, Virginia Rubino piano, Bobbi Jackson bass, and Cynth Fitzpatrick on sax. On one side was Judy Grahn’s Common Woman poem, and the other Bobbi Jackson’s song “Degradation.” Jackson bought the original painting (and I would love to know where it is now, since she died decades ago.) The Oakland Women’s Press Collective printed the album cover, their first 4-color process print job. A Finnish jazz aficionado reissued the recording in 2017.