Art to the Rescue

Knowing what is wrong and how to fix it is not the same as fixing it. It's been a busy couple of week with forcing myself past some pain to get well enough to look for a job. The anger management and stress is still a factor. As I've mused across so many platforms, I've set aside all of the things that used to help because I was trying to get the right people to leave me alone in the wrong way. Art is therapy. It doesn't have to sell. It doesn't even have to be shared. The process of making art is much easier if it sells, but it doesn't have to. What I should have done was put away people who wanted to take it away from me and done what was healthy.

In addition to doing a lot of baking (several bread fails), cooking, freezing the cooked meals and cleaning the house between loads of laundry I've been doing some honest art. And I've put to use some of the Pintrest items I've been hording. The result is a two day experiment with PicMonkey.

The result is that I have a half way decent folk motif.

Folk painting is really rather much the same from one country to the next. Norwegian rosemaling is rather similar to Polish paper cuts, Hungarian embroidery, and German and English tole painting all of which came to America with immigration. Russian gorodets painting is similar to all of them. The motifs are highly stylized and, in many cases, simplistic floral and animal forms. Folk painting, after all, is the realm of the public rather than the traditionally defined fine artist. Simple design and execution allows quick and affordable embellishment to brighten homes without he expense of hired craft painters. What sets Russian folk painting apart from the others?

Most tole painting is done on a white background in pure primaries and sometimes a secondary color. Norwegian roselmaling or telemark painting follows the tradition of bright bold color characterized by bold higlighting strokes. It is similar to Russian painting. Gorodets, employs a black background, extensive layering (more common in German tole work), and the use of white to highlight or exaggerate features. Unlike other forms of folk painting used as embellishment, gorodets seems to be the style for story telling on elaborate panels. Often times, due to the use of a wide range of rainbow colors in one panel the work takes on a gilded effect.

Another thing that I noticed with the gorodets style is the use of complicated patterns on the solid grounds. While most folk/tole painting employs varying brush handling techniques from one or two brushes to achieve patterns and highlights such as the tip of the handle to make dots, gorodets uses liner or script brushes to apply complicated patters beyond dots and swirls. You can see this here in the leaf veining pattern. Rather than a simple line, there is a pattern to represent the veins.

My Pintrest Board has a pretty good selection of images to compare and contrast to get a feel for what I am talking about here. There are many resources online for the specifics on all styles of painting and a few good youtube videos to help with the process.

This one is on Gorodets and this one is on Zhostovo. 
Gerhard Mounet Lipp is a  Bauernmalerei expert.  Bauern (farmer) malerei (painting)
And then there is this guy who is great with Rosemaling and telemark. And something that I had never heard of Romsdal. yeah.... when you get in to it there is more than tole.

And we haven't even gotten to the Italians and the Middle East!

Anyway, this is part of what I have been doing to keep myself sane.