(Don't miss the EPILOGUE at the bottom
of the page)
Born in the year of the dog, 1958, Amy Johnquest was reared in Novelty, Ohio with her three older half beast / half boy brothers, by closet animal beatnik parents. By day: normal middle-class American advertising executive Dad and devoted apron-clad homemaker Mom. By night: wild, gyrating, froth mouthed, art-fiend, jazz-junkies.
Raised as a Unitarian princess, Amy absorbed multitudes of multidimensional influences from the electrically charged Novelty environment. This included (but wasn't limited to) a fascination in her teen years for Diane Arbus, R. Crumb, Strawberry Hill Antiques, The Great Geauga County Fair (where she camped and exhibited her barrel-racing pony Flash) Jackson Pollock, Roy Rogers, prefad kitsch, David Bowie, Midnight Movies on Coventry, Television, The Cleveland Museum of Art and the Salvador Dali Museum (that Ohio since lost to Florida).
At seventeen she graduated with the Wolverines of West Geauga High School during the bicentennial of 1976. After a few years of Art and Horsemanship at the genteel private southern Baptist college of Virginia Intermont, she got a tattoo and took her AA degree to St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands. There she learned the lost art of hand lettering and sign painting by a strange and wonderful mail-order preacher named Shoupy who (while painting) sang operas -all the parts, male and female.
The experience of giving birth and the wonderment of child rearing brought Amy to the mainland where she delivered the extraordinary beautiful baby girl oddity Astrelle in a Debary, Florida carport in 1982 (also the year of the dog). Later while living among the Amish, she Obtained a BFA at Kent State University in Ohio, attended annual Junkstocks in Cleveland, made performance art, movies, spontaneous musical combustions, exhibited huge paintings of automobile boneyards, and ran a sign shop.
In 1993 the Amy and her daughter moved to Amherst, Mass. Here, Amy the Human Oddity took on a variety of art related work which included newspaper layout, free-lance writing, illustration, poster design, faux finishing, teaching, restoring old movie posters, gallery directing, and window display.
In the Spring of 1998 Amy experienced a profound revelation. It was as if God commanded her undeniable purpose in life. And so a queen was born on March fourth, nineteen hundred and ninety eight; a Banner Queen with a sideshow heart.
--written December, 1999
there's more... CLICK HERE FOR the EPILOGUE
(c)A. Johnquest 1999