i am sassa

Aviator, author, activist.

Really all I knew of Amelia Earhart before today is that she was one of the first women to fly, and that she disappeared trying to break a record. I don’t even think I had ever watched any videos speculating about what happened to her. Today I found out there are SO MANY, and I got sucked right in to the mystery. It’s a strange experience to paint an inspiring, beautiful soul while picturing her being eaten by giant crabs on a remote island. Or hanging on to bits of plane while arguing with her alcoholic navigator (I always thought she was alone!). Or living in New Jersey with a different name, or being captured alive by the Japanese because she was a spy…what? That one apparently has some meat to it…at least enough that the History channel made a documentary about it a few years back called The Lost Evidence. I haven’t watched it yet. I was too busy listening to the National Geographic one below about the giant crabs.

I didn’t want to paint her because of the mystery, though. I painted her because she was a fearless pioneer. She rejected the gender norms of her day and followed the passion that fired up in her when she took her first plane ride. And she was in no way satisfied to sit back and let the guys break all the records, despite the fact that even some of her family rejected her for being “un-ladylike”. Pfft.

In 1928, Amelia was offered a chance to be the first woman to fly across the Atlantic…as a passenger, with pilot Bill Stultz. BOO. She became an instant celebrity upon her return, though in her words, she served as nothing but a “sack of potatoes” since all she did was ride along. Screw this, she said, and just went ahead and became the second person ever and first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. Then the first woman to fly solo across the U.S. Then earned the distinguished Flying Cross medal I painted her wearing. All while working hard to promote opportunities for women in aviation. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Stultz. (just kidding, I guess he did some stuff, too.)

It was in 1937 during an attempted flight around the world that she disappeared. And there are LOTS of clues that are really eerie, including reports of people all around the globe accidentally hearing her radio distress calls. While I don’t want to speculate much on what happened to her, there is one bizarre clue that resonated with me. The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery has made quite a few trips to the island of Nikumaroro in the southwest Pacific, believing that’s where she could have ended up. Among other items found were fragments of a jar that perfectly matches jars of Dr. C. H. Berry’s Freckle Ointment, which was marketed to rid women of their pesky freckles, while also containing 11% mercury. Apparently among Earhart enthusiasts, it is common knowledge that she hated her freckles.

Cut to a memory of me, around 11 years old, reading an article in Teen Magazine on how to cover up those fugly freckles that have been plaguing us unfortunate redheads since at least the late 1800s, it seems. I just remember thinking, I didn’t know they were bad. I don’t think I ever tried to cover them up, though, and I certainly didn’t slather my skin in mercury. Would I have in the 1930s? Maybe. Regardless, all I could think about when I heard about the freckle cream was this: If I could gather up all female energy that has ever been spent trying to fix something about the way we look, something someone else convinced us was wrong with us, what would that collective energy look like? What could it do?

My favorite part of this painting is her freckles.