Gorodets painting in the interior. Painted flowers of unprecedented beauty! The story of Gorodets painting

Gorodets painting is a folk art craft. Bright textured drawings are made with a free stroke with a graphic stroke. A wide variety of household items and decorative paraphernalia were decorated with Russian motifs.

The history of the fishery

The birthplace of Gorodets painting is the Volga region. Residents of the villages of Khlebaikha, Kurtsevo, Savino, Bukino and some other villages decorated the spinning wheels with carvings, and then tinted the ornament in order to later sell the products at the Nizhny Novgorod fair. Over time, colorful patterns completely replaced carved decor, and bright drawings began to be called Nizhny Novgorod painting.

The term "Gorodets pattern" appeared only in the 1930s, when the work of one of the most dedicated researchers of Russian folk crafts, V.M. Vasilenko. Gorodets is the main market for painted utensils. The masters took this fact into account, and the patterns displayed the way of life, customs, images associated with the town. Over time, the painting became the artistic personification of the culture and color of Gorodets and its environs.

Local craftsmen skillfully managed in wood carving. The forest expanses allowed craftsmen to use cheap and affordable material to create their masterpieces. The heyday of the craft is associated with the activities of Peter the Great, who demanded that his warships be decorated with carvings and paintings. Over time, the ships were relocated closer to the new conquered lands, and craftsmen began to look for other directions to apply the accumulated experience.

The heyday of the Gorodets craft began in 1870, when the icon painter Ogurechnikov arrived in one of the villages. His goal was to renew the paintings of the local church. It was he who helped local craftsmen to master new skills: “animation” with squirrels, the use of several paint balls at once, and other techniques.

Colors of Gorodets painting

Egg paints were originally used for painting. They were replaced by oily, tempera and gouache compositions. The coloring composition was applied to the canvas in large spots, without preliminarily forming clear contours.

Initially, craftsmen worked on primed surfaces. Later, after the Second World War, raw wood was chosen as the basis. This allowed the drawings to be made lighter, giving them transparency.

Zamalevki. For patterns in the form of berries and flowers, the following colors are used: ocher, pink (a mixture of red and white tones), pure red, burgundy (red and black), blue (blue and white), blue. For the design of the sheets use clean green color. Small leaves and curls were sometimes decorated with brown paint.
Tenevka. The main colors of the shade are black, brown and blue. Due to the use of a deep black tone, against which the key elements of the ornament were drawn, it was possible to obtain a bright and rather contrasting pattern. If a brown tone was used for the shade, the painting turned out to be lighter and more delicate.
Livery. Used for refreshment White color. yellow tint used less frequently. It was needed only if the leaves were given volumetric accents.

Basic colors by numbers

The main colors that are traditionally used for Gorodets ornaments:

Ocher(#CC7722);
Pink(#FFC0CB);
Red(#FF0000);
Blue(#00BFFF);
Blue(#964B00);
White(#FFFFFF);
Green(#00FF00);
Black(#000000);
Yellow(#FFFF00).

Elements and motifs of Gorodets painting

There are three basic types of compositions. This is a “pure” flower painting, a composition with the inclusion of a “horse” motif and a complex plot painting.

Floral ornament is the easiest to perform. There are several elements of the ornament:

"Bouquet" is a symmetrical image. These are small compositions consisting of 1 - 3 flowers. Decorate boxes, caskets, cups, salt shakers, cups, bowls;
"Garland" - a type of "bouquet", when one large flower is located in the center, and a composition with smaller flowers is built around it;
"Rhombus" - a variation of the "garland". Several large flowers form the center, and the leaves and buds decrease at the top of the diamond. The ornament often adorns large chests, large cutting boards, cabinet doors and breadbaskets;
"Flower stripe" is a complex composition consisting of the upper and lower tiers. The ornament can be formed from a strip of flowers of the same size or from floral elements that are different in color, shape and type;
"Wreath" - a variation of the "flower strip", but only of a closed type. Usually decorates the surfaces of dishes, trays, caskets, wine barrels.

Motives "horse" and "bird"

There are symmetrical and asymmetric compositions. Birds and horses are most often placed in the center flowering tree or framed by a wreath. There are products-sets, on each of which there are several motives at once. For example, a chicken and a cockerel or two horses of different colors.

Similar patterns look more effective on black and red canvases. Basic color: ocher, gold, orange, yellow. The paired image of birds represents family harmony and well-being. Horses symbolize success and prosperity.

Story painting

Plot drawings are placed on large items: chests, dishes, countertops. Masters traditionally depicted scenes of tea parties and celebrations, weddings against the backdrop of a rich table, tables with cups, flowers and samovars. The faces of the people turned towards the audience, which often gave unnecessarily complex compositions a certain implausibility.

The favorite theme of the drawings is the exteriors of houses with carved shutters, bright architraves, chimneys. The picture was complemented by wells, wicker fences with flowers or jugs and sitting roosters. In addition, the canvas could be "enriched" with images of other animals - dogs, cats, chickens with chickens.

Technique for performing Gorodets painting

The painting is done directly on a wooden base, which is initially primed with yellow, red and black colors. Each primary color is “whitened”, thus, exactly doubling the number of colors in the palette.

On the surface, the main lines of the painting are outlined with thin lines with a pencil. Particular attention is paid to the "nodes" of the picture, that is, the largest and most important elements. Medium and small details act as links for large patterns and can be performed during improvisation.

In the nodes of the painting with a wide brush form the basis of the flower. Usually, this spot is irregularly round or oval in shape. A darker color is applied over the light spots. The entire painting consists of simple elements: brackets, arcs, spirals, strokes, drops, and the actual underpainting itself.

The final stage is the application of contrasting (black or white) strokes and dots over the finished drawing. This stage is carried out with the help of the thinnest brush. As soon as the canvas dries, the painting is “fixed” with a thick layer of varnish.

Gorodets painting on wood is among the highest achievements of Russian folk art. What ideas do we have at the mention of this craft? Some will present bright spinning wheels, boxes, screens and other products from Gorodets, exhibited in the halls of the State Historical Museum or the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. Others will remember children's painted tables, chairs, shelves, toys. Many apartments are decorated with elegant and durable bread bins and cutting boards.

However, there was a time when this industry was not given special significance. So, in one of the reference publications of the end of the 19th century, they wrote about him: "Gorodets painting on wood is one of the many handicrafts that existed in the Nizhny Novgorod province, which owes its appearance to the infertility of the local lands." And the members of the commission for the study of the handicraft industry in Russia even spoke like this: "Whoever has seen the drawings on the donets knows how rude they are." And one should pay tribute to those representatives of the then society of Russia, who highly appreciated this art. These are the people our great artists and the most perspicacious collectors turned out to be.

I.E. became interested in Gorodets painting earlier than others. Repin, E.D. and V.D. Polenov, V.M. Vasnetsov, industrialist and philanthropist of the SI. Mamontov, director of the Russian historical museum, historian I.E. Zabelin, trustee of the Handicraft Museum of the Moscow Provincial Zemstvo S.T. Morozov.

However, truly Gorodets carving and painting were discovered only in the early 1920s, during the preparation of the exhibition "Russian Peasant Art", held in the halls of the Russian Historical Museum. This exhibition was a unique phenomenon in the history of Russian art. The words written on the poster of the exhibition fully applied to the Gorodets painting: “At present, the works of peasant artists have been pulled out from under a bushel and the museum has the opportunity to make them available for public viewing. attention. In many cases, the peasant artist can point out new paths to our contemporary art."

On the territory of the Nizhny Novgorod region, masters created completely different types of wood painting - Gorodets and Fedoseev, Polkhovmaidan and Khokhloma. Gorodets painting arose and flourished in close proximity to the "kingdom" of Khokhloma. But the golden sheen of Khokhloma did not overshadow the bright festivity of the works of the Gorodets masters. If Khokhloma strikes with a golden sheen, as if fantastic red-black inflorescences and herbs born in fire, fine calligraphy of the finest lines, then Gorodets painting captivates with the richness of the colors of the Russian summer with its herbs, the bright sun, as if flooding with its light lush garlands of flowers, bizarre birds, slender horses running through fabulous meadows.

Gorodets painting moved into the first row of folk crafts in Russia because it surprisingly organically combined commitment to ancient traditions with an open joyful perception modern life. Folk craftsmen combined rich floral ornaments, images of fabulous animals and pictures of modern life in a city, village, estate, and the famous Nizhny Novgorod fair into a single artistic system. At the same time, "magic realism" became the basis of the style of Gorodets painting - the transformation of everyday life into a peasant artist's dream of happy life man on a beautiful flowering land, in complete harmony with nature.

The most sophisticated connoisseurs are fascinated by the courage of Gorodets painters in choosing subjects, their skill in building multi-figure scenes, the expressiveness of the heroes of the painting, the beautifully painted interiors, according to all the laws of decorative art, and the luxurious floral ornament.

To understand why Gorodets painting has become exactly like this, you definitely need to visit its homeland. These are the villages and villages of Khlebaikha, Kurtsevo, Koskovo, Savino, Buki and others, located along the banks of the Volga tributary - the Uzola River. Why was the painting called Gorodets? Why is it not Kurtsevskaya, not Koskovskaya, not Savinskaya, or at least Uzolskaya? The name "Gorodets" sounded only in the 1930s after the appearance of the works of one of the most famous researchers folk culture V.M. Vasilenko. In earlier editions we are talking about "Nizhny Novgorod painting" or about "Kurts dyers". The new name stuck because Gorodts was the main market for Uzol painted utensils and also had wood painting workshops. But the most important thing: it was with him, his way of life, mores, images, starting from mid-nineteenth century, the very content of the painting is connected. The famous Uzol painting has grown on the basis of the entire artistic culture of Gorodets and its environs, the history of which has more than eight centuries. Without knowledge of the centuries-old history of Gorodets and its crafts, one cannot understand the essence of Gorodets painting.

Each of the periods of Gorodets history is interesting in its own way. The city arose in the second half of the 12th century as a military outpost of Russia on the banks of the Volga. In the XIII century, Gorodets was the capital of the Gorodetsky principality, and then became part of the Nizhny Novgorod-Suzdal Grand Duchy. The early history of the Gorodetsky principality is associated with the names of Andrei Bogolyubsky, Mstislav Udaly, Alexander Nevsky. The Russian chronicles reflected not only the construction of the city and the successful raids of the princes on the Bulgars, but also terrible events - the attack on Goroden by the ords of Batu Khan. "The Tatars took castles, burning them, monasteries and churches and princely and residential people's courtyards betraying the same flame ... barefoot and bloodless people, dying of scum, bringing them full to their own countries," the author of the Nikon Chronicle testifies about the events of 1238. But after five or six years, the surviving residents of Gorodets restored the city. Soon the younger brother of Alexander Nevsky, Andrei, became the prince in it. His clash with the Tatar Khan Pevrey threatened with a new invasion of the Tatars, which so far had nothing to repel. The older brother Alexander Yaroslavich had to go to the Horde with a bow and gifts. He returned already seriously ill and, having barely reached Gorodets in November 1263, he died here in the Fedorovsky Monastery.

Gorodets, being the center of trade and shipbuilding in the 19th century, has always remained a bright, original center national culture. The originality of local cultural traditions largely determined by the unique geographical position of Gorodets. Since the 12th century, it has been an inseparable part of the Vladimir-Suzdal land with its highest traditions of architecture, icon painting, and decorative art.

If you try to trace the origins of Gorodets painting, then you need to remember that Gorodets of the 17th-19th centuries was one of the centers of the Old Believers. It was it that had a noticeable impact on the spiritual life of the Gorodets district and its crafts. From the icons brought here by settlers from the northern lands after the destruction of the Pomeranian and Solovetsky monasteries by the tsarist authorities, local icon painting began.

The greedy susceptibility to everything new attracted peasant artists to depict all these innovations, new people, festive festivities in the city, steamships on the Volga, and fair entertainment.

The glory of Gorodets painting began with the decoration of women's household items. These are spinning bottoms, weaving mills and cupboards, caskets and high chairs. The Uzol craftsmen were especially fond of decorating spinning wheels. "A girl behind a spinning wheel is one of the characteristic images of old Russian peasant life. A girl's life is always decorated and decorative; a spinning wheel, standing next to a spinner, adorned her along with clothes, embroideries, beads and ribbons. She was often a gift from a man, cut out and signed with love letters. dreams and thoughts, as evidenced by a number of inscriptions preserved on the spinning wheels, "it is difficult to say about the spinning wheel better than it was done almost 100 years ago by B.C. Voronov.

The Gorodets spinning wheel, as if by its nature, is intended for the work of an artist. Unlike spinning wheels, cut from a single piece of wood, it consists of two parts - a bottom and a comb. The base of the spinning wheel - the bottom - is a fairly wide board, the dimensions of which fluctuate. If the length is almost always about 70 cm, then the width is from 30 to 50 cm. A spear is attached to the front rounded part of such a board - a tetrahedral truncated pyramid with a hole in the upper part for inserting a rather large comb on a long handle. The comb served to attach the tow - flax or wool. The spinner, putting the bottom on the bench, sat on it and began to spin, winding the thread around the spindle. And now, with the talent and skill of the Gorodets masters of the Donets, they have become works of high art, striking with their beauty for more than one generation of connoisseurs.

According to local legend, the masters of the Uzol valley received their first painting skills from the artist N.I. Ogurechnikov, who in 1870 renovated the murals of the church in the village of Kurtsevo. Sharp-witted men from Kurtsev and Koskov, who closely followed his work, managed to find out the secrets of preparing paints, remember the methods of working with a brush. But local masters learned not only from painters.

Here we will have to get acquainted with the Uzol wood carvers. They made spinning bottoms, decorating them with a carved pattern. At first, carving was common for peasant utensils: geometric nets, rosettes with diverging rays - symbolic images of the sun, which are also called solar signs. And within a few years, along with the traditional carving, a completely different one appeared - both in content and in execution technique. Not ancient magical signs, but modern life, its images have become the main ones.

Scenes of equestrian hunts with dogs and falcons appeared on the Donets, riders on rearing horses with bare swords, luxurious carriages rushing at full speed with footmen on their backs and dashing coachmen on their rims. Scenes of city festivities were depicted with amazing love and diligence - magnificently dressed ladies with indispensable umbrellas in their hands, their gentlemen in frock coats with tightly tied waists, in high buckwheat (kind of cylinders) or cocked hats with plumes. Undoubtedly, having appeared in the market, such products of carvers made a splash. But not only with plots, but also with new carving techniques. Instead of the usual trihedral-notched carving, a faster execution, less painstaking, but by no means less expressive contour and bracket carving was used. With the help of different widths of semicircular chisels and thin knives, the carver created paintings unprecedented in the former folk art.

Old Gorodets masters. From left to right:
Ignatii Andreevich Mazin, Fedor Semenovich Krasioyarov, Ignatii Klemeitievich Lebedev

It is also interesting that among the innovations introduced by the Uzol masters to the carving was the use of color: from coloring individual fragments of the carving with berry juice or decoctions of plants to a unique inlay with bog oak. The material for such work was not far away, at the bottom of his native Uzola. The winding wayward river during the flood period often washed away the banks, felled trees into the water. From a long lying in the water, the wood of all other species disappears, and only the oak acquires an increasing strength and a characteristic black color, to which a slightly bluish tint is added over time.

Catching pieces of bog oak from Uzola, local craftsmen soon learned how to process it well. They cut rather thin (3-5 mm thick) plates, round carnations and other details from the solid wood, which they began to include in their carved compositions. The technique of this inlay was absolutely amazing: neither glue nor any devices for attaching the inlays were used here. Figures of horses, riders, carriage wheels and other inserts were placed in specially carved recesses and attached with wooden studs, combining both artistic and technical purpose. Such carnations fastened and decorated the hooves of horses, depicted their eyes, they also outlined the outline of the carriage with a dotted ornament. Sometimes such an ornament ran along the edge of the bottom and gradually became a distinctive feature of the entire group of inlaid bottoms.

Another important feature inherited by painters from carvers is the extraordinary concreteness and accuracy in the details of the image. The carver does not carve a carriage at all, but a 19th-century spring carriage, or depicts an old "Catherine's" carriage, which can now be seen in museums.

Carving with inlay existed in the Uzolye for only a few decades: this craft practically ceased by the 70s of the 19th century. Consequently, its history was connected with the life of no more than two generations of masters, but amazing masters. Among them, it is necessary to mention Lazar and Anton Melnikovs, Anton Nikolaev, in whose work the circle of images characteristic of Gorodets art has already been basically determined - these are ladies and gentlemen, these are military men, often riders, these are dogs, birds and beautiful Gorodets horses. There were also favorite stories - festivities, gallant scenes.

In the geometric, narrative carving of Gorodets, and later in his painting, another important feature of folk art appeared - the combination of reality and fantasy in one composition. Spinners at work, the scene of presenting a wedding gift to the bride side by side with the figures of fantastic horsemen, with unprecedented plants that look like palm trees.

The transition from carving to painting was carried out quite smoothly and gradually, and the carvers themselves participated in it. Very interesting in this regard is one of the donets of Lazar Melnikov, which is important - he signed it. On this bottom, the upper part of the composition is made using the technique of carving, the middle part is carved with tint, and in the lower part there is a rosette painted with paints and a brush.

So, having carefully looked at the Gorodets carving with inlay and later carving with tint, it is easy to make sure that the carvers were the direct teachers of the painters. It was they who determined the main theme of the future painting, identified its main characters, they laid the foundation for the visual language of Gorodets art. In a word, on the basis of the old art, something completely new was born - peasant painting, which absorbed the beauty of the surrounding nature, everyday life - not only the material, but also the spiritual value of the things associated with it, the marvelous pattern of old books, icons, needlework.

And the development of this new craft took place at an unprecedented speed for folk art, in just two or three decades.

In the 1870s, Uzol craftsmen began to produce wooden items decorated with bright paintings. In the foreground, of course, were the spinning bottoms, starting with modest, narrow ones, decorated with a single flower, a branch with berries, a bird or a skate - in a word, an ordinary market product, to wide, monumental ones, where the artist, showing all his art, performed painting in three whole tiers. There were scenes of crowded festivities and feasts, images of military battles, seeing off to the soldiers, dashing officers on horseback and important ladies in a decorous conversation. The painting was often made by special order as a gift to the bride from her mother or groom. The ritual purpose of such donets is confirmed not only by the richness of the paintings and special subjects, but also by the inscriptions on the spinning wheels or the stories of local old-timers. The donce was not only a working tool - it was treated with great respect. After finishing work, they freed it from the comb and hung it on the wall; it, like popular prints, embroidered towels, shiny icon frames, adorned the peasant's house and brought joy to it.
The forms of local spinning donets were almost perfectly worked out by the Gorodets carvers of the first half of the 19th century. They learned how to cut the bottom itself out of aspen and attach a head to it for inserting a comb - spears, decorate the edges of the bottom with smooth semicircular cuts, make it the height of grace, decorating two side faces with an inlaid bird and a horse, the other two with thin longitudinal cuts reminiscent of the flutes of ancient columns . However, the painters needed smooth surfaces for work, and the edges of the bottom and the edges of the co-ardor become even over time. But having become less expressive in form, the bottoms of the second half of the 19th century blossomed like a fairy garden.

The Gorodets painter manages to write a bright bird among flowers, a black horse on a very small plane of a kopyk. And when it comes to decorating the wide plane of the bottom, there is no limit to his imagination! People in then fashionable costumes, animals and birds, fantastic flowers, rooms - almost palace halls and streets with their motley crowd. But no matter how fantastic the ideas of the master, a certain order, custom, canon always reigns in his painting. And according to this custom, he divides the oblong surface of the bottom into three tiers. Upper, near the stump, usually slightly larger than the lower; the ornamental frieze separates both parts. It can consist of multi-colored stripes, or it can become a lush garland of flowers or a branch with berries. It depends only on the taste of the master whether to write all the bottoms on the same background or make the background different for the upper and lower parts of the composition. Often there are bottoms written on a favorite single golden-yellow background, but it also happens like this: the top mark is orange, and the bottom one is bright purple.

The hallmarks differed not only in background color, but also in plots. In the upper part of the bottom, the master often turned to the world of people, while in the lower part there was the realm of nature - images of animals or plants. But this is only the general scheme for constructing the painting of the classical donets, and the masters did not always follow it unquestioningly. The unique charm of Gorodets painting is precisely in the constant deviation from the canon, in the feeling of creative freedom of each master.
Next to an elegant painted spinning wheel there was usually a painted urinal - a box for spindles and "lobes". (“Lobe” is a flax tow prepared for yarn.) For the manufacture of urinals in the spring, preferably in damp windy weather, they prepared a linden bast, cut it into strips of the desired size, steamed it, bent it, and then sewed it in a special way - “lock”, using a thin and strong pine root. From this sewn strip of bast, the base of an oblong oval box was obtained, to which a smooth wooden bottom was subsequently attached. - and the urinal was ready.

The most common was the following order of decorating the urinal: two plot scenes - on the longitudinal sides of the box, two ornamental motifs - on the end. One scene was separated from the other by a vertical stripe of a characteristic Gorodets ornament - a string, bindweed, crossed brackets.

It would seem that it would have been much more convenient to paint a rose, a garland of flowers, or another ornamental motif on a small space on the wall of the urinal, but the Uzol artist argued here that without depicting scenes of modern life, there is no Gorodets painting. How amazingly he used the expressiveness of the poses and gestures of his characters, truly directorially built almost theatrical mise-en-scenes. There is a lot to learn here for the colorist as well. In the painting of the spinner "Spinner" from the collection of the Gorodetsky Historical and Artistic museum complex the author uses an extremely beautiful coloristic solution. Against a blue background, he paints a scene of village gatherings and a scene of a date for young people, using orange-pink, green, black and white colors.

The images on the end sides of the urinals often had a deep meaning. Such, for example, is a favorite motif in Gorodets painting - the image of a clock in a rich ornamental frame. The figure of an elderly woman - the mother of the bride or groom on the other end of the urinal, as it were, also reminds of the inexorable run of time. These images are another confirmation that urinals, like spinning wheels, were not just everyday peasant things, but were associated with village rituals and holidays, the most important of which was a wedding.

No matter how good urinals and baskets are, it’s hard for them to argue with beauty and originality with painted chairs - nurses and wheelchairs (the so-called chairs with wheels attached to them).

Gorodets chairs, depending on the size, were intended for the children themselves and for their dolls. This is a special area of creativity for Gorodets artists - work on decorating an object of complex three-dimensional shape. Turned wheelchairs - children's chairs on wheels - were made in the villages of Repino and Koskovo, and bent chairs were made by peasants in Nikulin and Skolzikhino. For one wheelchair, more than three dozen parts were machined from aspen or birch. With the help of wooden axles and spikes, without nails or glue, these parts were connected so firmly that even today they remain intact and unharmed.

However, such chairs and wheelchairs became truly Gorodetsky only when they were painted on a crimson, brown, yellow, blue or black background. First, the seat was painted - a small plane about 20x20 cm in size, sometimes in the shape of a trapezoid. This part of the work was considered the most difficult and responsible. The most common motif here is a branch with berries and small leaves, written diagonally across the plane. A special role was played by the bleaching hatching, thanks to which the branch came to life, gained graphic clarity, but did not lose its picturesqueness. The master's love for the freedom and virtuosity of the whitening stroke was especially evident in the frame of the seat of the chair and the composition on its back - the visor.

At the disposal of the artist was only a narrow, about 2.5 cm wide, framing and a small board on the back - no more than 20x8 cm. The master ran a light stroke around the square, in the center of which a branch, a flower, a cat, a boy riding dog or other funny story. White brackets, brackets with a stroke in the middle of each hole, an intricate string or just a white stroke could serve as a frame.

Birds or animals often appear on Gorodets chairs. A particularly favorite character was a cat - a kind Cat-Purr. He was depicted with a large round head, prominent mustache, green eyes. Masters often painted lying, curled up cats, but they especially loved proudly sitting, surrounded by flowers and berries. Black, gray and bright red cats appear not only on chairs, but also on urinals, baskets.

A canon, a kind of typical composition, has developed in the Gorodets portrait. A small stamp contained a full-length figure, bust or generational image of a person in a three-quarter turn, sitting in an armchair or on a chair with a high back. The master also designated part of the furnishings of the house, drawing a high arched window with an intricate binding. Much attention was paid to other details of the interior - a table on carved patterned legs, a large flowerpot with flowers, sometimes a part of a patterned iol, cut into squares of parquet, was depicted.

In books written about Gorodets painting, it was often said that its style was undoubtedly associated with the folk picture-lubok. But with what kind of splint? The heyday of the Russian lubok picture - a hand-colored wood and copper engraving fell on late 18th- first half of XIX century. In the second half of the 19th century, this art began to decline, and it was replaced by the so-called lubok-type products. In the printing houses of Moscow and St. Petersburg, oleophafia and "prostoviks" of very poor artistic quality were printed - lithofaphia, hand-painted by city artisans, recent immigrants from peasants. They depicted contemporary events, famous people, for example, the well-known General Skobelev, fairy tales, scenes village life, feasts of merchants in rich restaurants. These pictures were so artistically insignificant that none of the art critics even wanted to understand them. But, as it turned out, the Gorodets masters looked at them "with all eyes" and looked at all in vain: they needed to learn how to write scenes of today's life, the buyer demanded from them that the plots, scenes of the life of the townspeople and the Volga merchants, knowledge of the furnishings of houses and modern pretty complex women's and men's costume. Late splint turned out to be an excellent auxiliary material, a kind of cheat sheet. And the talent of the Gorodets craftsmen was to be able to use this working material as nothing more than a hint. They peeped from urban artisans techniques, principles for solving space, amusing details and rethought them as genuine artists who masterfully wielded a brush.

Fedor Semenovich Krpsnoyarov is one of the greatest masters of the Gorodets trade.

What ideas do we have at the mention of this craft? Some will present bright spinning wheels, boxes, screens and other products from Gorodets, exhibited in the halls of the State Historical Museum or the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. Others will remember children's painted tables, chairs, shelves, toys. Many apartments are decorated with elegant and durable bread bins and cutting boards.

Elegant and durable products of the Gorodets craft can be found in many homes. These are cutting boards, caskets, salt shakers, children's rocking horses, etc.
However, there was a time when this craft was not given much importance. So, in one of the reference publications of the late 19th century, they wrote about him: “Gorodets painting on wood is one of the many handicrafts that existed in the Nizhny Novgorod province, which owes its appearance to the infertility of the local lands.” And the members of the commission for the study of the handicraft industry in Russia even spoke like this: "Whoever saw the drawings on the bottoms knows how rude they are." And one should pay tribute to those representatives of the then society of Russia, who highly appreciated this art. These are the people our great artists and the most perspicacious collectors turned out to be. I.E. became interested in Gorodets painting earlier than others. Repin, E.D. and V.D. Polenov, V.M. Vasnetsov, industrialist and philanthropist S.I. Mamontov, director of the Russian Historical Museum, historian I.E. Zabelin, trustee of the Handicraft Museum of the Moscow Provincial Zemstvo S.T. Morozov.
This exhibition was a unique phenomenon in the history of Russian art. The words written on the poster of the exhibition fully applied to the Gorodets painting: “At present, the works of peasant artists have been pulled out from under a bushel and the museum is getting the opportunity to make them available for public viewing. Almost no one knows peasant art, and yet it is worthy of our deep attention. In many cases, the peasant artist can show new paths to our contemporary art.”

A noticeable revival occurred then in the study of the crafts of the Nizhny Novgorod region. In 1924, a handicraft department was opened in the Gorodets Museum, where the works of peasant craftsmen were collected. The world of peasant household life has become the subject of serious study and deep reflection of contemporaries. From individual surviving items, scattered facts, from meetings and conversations with craftsmen, a fairly complete and objective idea of Goroshche and the Gorodets district as an original center of peasant art in Russia was finally formed.
On the territory of the Nizhny Novgorod region, masters created completely different types of wood painting - Gorodets and Fedoseev, Polkhovmaidan and Khokhloma. Gorodets painting arose and flourished in close proximity to the “kingdom” of Khokhloma. But the golden sheen of Khokhloma did not overshadow the bright festivity of the works of the Gorodets masters. Khokhloma strikes with its golden sheen, as if fantastic red-black inflorescences and herbs born in fire, fine calligraphy of the finest lines.
To understand why Gorodets painting has become exactly like this, you definitely need to visit its homeland.
Each of the periods of Gorodets history is interesting in its own way. In the XIII century, Gorodets was the capital of the Gorodetsky principality, and then became part of the Nizhny Novgorod-Suzdal Grand Duchy. The early history of the Gorodetsky principality is associated with the names of Andrei Bogolyubsky, Mstislav Udaly, Alexander Nevsky. The Russian chronicles reflected not only the construction of the city and the successful raids of the princes on the Bulgars, but also terrible events - the attack on Gorodets by the hordes of Batu. But after five or six years, the surviving residents of Gorodets restored the city. Soon the younger brother of Alexander Nevsky, Andrei, became the prince in it. His clash with the Tatar Khan Nevrey threatened with a new invasion of the Tatars, which so far had nothing to repel. The older brother Alexander Yaroslavich had to go to the Horde with a bow and gifts. He returned already seriously ill and, having barely reached Gorodets in November 1263, he died here in the Fedorovsky Monastery.

In the 16th century, a second name was assigned to Gorodets - Small Kitezh, in contrast to the legendary Big Kitezh that hid from enemies in the waters of Lake Svetloyar, which is not so far from Gorodets.
Gradually losing the importance of a military outpost, Gorodets gained strength as a trade and craft center. It was famous for its chauffeurs, tanners and saddlers, embroiderers and gold seamstresses. In former times, the city was filled with the honey spirit of the Gorodets Iryaiki. who have been baking here since the century. There were so many of them that they were enough for the neighboring Balakhna and Nizhny Novgorod, and for the distant Tver and Astrakhan. The following testimony has come down to us from a century: “At 15 versts from Balakhna there was ... the trading village of Gorodets, in which “noble auctions” took place every Saturday. The list of what was then traded in Gorodets takes several pages.
Gorodets, being a center of trade and shipbuilding in the 19th century, has always remained a bright, original center of national culture. The originality of local cultural traditions was largely determined by the unique geographical location of Gorodets. Since the 12th century, it has been an inseparable part of the Vladimir-Suzdal land with its highest traditions of architecture, icon painting, and decorative art.
If you try to trace the origins of Gorodets painting, then you need to remember that Gorodets of the 17th-19th centuries was one of the centers of the Old Believers. From the icons brought here by settlers from the northern lands after the destruction of the Pomeranian and Solovetsky monasteries by the tsarist authorities, local icon painting began.

Sometimes intuitively, but more often quite consciously, the masters of Gorodets painting strove to continue the traditions of the Nizhny Novgorod icon, especially its floral ornaments - “herbal writing”. It was this iconic patterning with its refined techniques of painting flowers and herbs, collecting them into garlands and bouquets that was an excellent school for every Gorodets master, and a familiar school, familiar from childhood. The icon taught both the beauty of color, and the expressiveness of silhouettes, and the methods of constructing space, and the significance of every detail. The originality of Gorodets painting was born at the junction of the traditions of the Old Believer forest Trans-Volga region, the famous Nizhny Novgorod fair, the influence of which was felt in the economy, life, and customs of the entire Volga region. »
The greedy susceptibility to everything new attracted peasant artists to depict all these innovations, new people, festive festivities in the city, steamships on the Volga, and fair amusements.
The glory of Gorodets painting began with the decoration of women's household items. These are spinning bottoms, weaving mills and cupboards, caskets and high chairs. The Uzol craftsmen were especially fond of decorating spinning wheels.
The Gorodets spinning wheel, as if by its nature, is intended for the work of an artist. The base of the spinning wheel - the bottom - is a fairly wide board, the dimensions of which fluctuate. If the length is almost always about 70 cm, then the width is from 30 to 50 cm. A spear is attached to the front rounded part of such a board - a tetrahedral truncated pyramid with a hole in the upper part for inserting a rather large comb on a long handle. The comb served to attach the tow - flax or wool. The spinner, putting the bottom on the bench, sat on it and began to spin, winding the thread around the spindle. And now, with the talent and skill of the Gorodets masters of the Donets, they have become works of high art, striking with their beauty for more than one generation of connoisseurs.

According to local legend, the masters of the Uzol valley received their first painting skills from the artist N.I. Ogurechnikov, who in 1870 renovated the murals of the church in the village of Kurtsevo. But local masters learned not only from painters.
Here we will have to get acquainted with the Uzol woodcarvers. They made spinning bottoms, decorating them with a carved pattern. At first, carving was common for peasant utensils: geometric nets, rosettes with diverging rays - symbolic images of the sun, which are also called solar signs. And for several years, along with the traditional
carving, a completely different one appeared - both in content and in technique x \ 'v. execution. Not ancient magical signs, but modern life, its images have become the main ones.
Scenes of equestrian hunts with dogs and falcons appeared on the bottoms, riders on rearing horses with naked swords, luxurious carriages rushing at full speed with lackeys at the back and dashing coachmen on their rims. With amazing love and diligence, the couples of city festivities were depicted - magnificently dressed ladies with indispensable umbrellas in their hands, their gentlemen in frock coats with tightly tied waists, in high buckwheat (kind of cylinders) or cocked hats with plumes. Undoubtedly, having appeared in the market, such products of carvers made a splash. But not only with plots, but also with new carving techniques. Instead of the usual trihedral-notched carving, a faster execution, less painstaking, but by no means less expressive contour and bracket carving was used. With the help of different widths of semicircular chisels and thin knives, the carver created paintings unprecedented in the old art.

Performing inlaid carved bottoms, the craftsmen mastered various compositional techniques. Along with the vertical tiered composition, a horizontal one was also used, which gave enough space to place on the bottom and a massive carriage with a lady sitting in it, and a mine harnessed to the carriage, and a coachman with a whip, and a lackey on the back. And the first thing that attracts in the bottoms with carriages is an unmistakable sense of scale, the ratio of the image and the background. Every detail is visible, significant, and extremely expressive. The carved donets have already fully manifested the professionalism of the townspeople in building a plot composition based on a clear organic rhythm. This rhythm will develop even more in the painting.
Another important feature inherited by painters from carvers is the extraordinary concreteness and accuracy in the details of the image. The carver cuts out not the carriage at all, but the spring carriage
century, or depicts the old "Catherine" carriage, which can now be seen in museums.

In the geometric, narrative carving of Gorodets, and later in painting, another important feature of folk art was manifested - the combination of reality and fantasy in one composition. Spinners at work, the scene of presenting a wedding gift to the bride side by side with the figures of fantastic horsemen, with unprecedented plants that look like palm trees.
So, having carefully looked at the Gorodets carving with inlay and later carving with tinting, it is easy to make sure that the carvers were the direct teachers of the painters. It was they who determined the main theme of the future painting, identified its main characters, they laid the foundation for the visual language of Gorodets art. In a word, on the basis of the old art, something completely new was born - peasant painting, which absorbed the beauty of the surrounding nature, everyday life - not only the material, but also the spiritual value of the caves associated with it, the marvelous pattern of old books, icons, needlework.
In the foreground, of course, were spinning bottoms, starting with modest, narrow ones, decorated with a single flower, a branch with berries, a bird or a horse — in a word, an ordinary bazaar product, to wide, monumental ones, where the artist, showing all his art, performed painting in three whole tiers. There were scenes of crowded festivities and feasts, images of military battles, seeing off to the soldiers, dashing officers on horseback and important ladies in a decorous conversation. The painting was often made by special order as a gift to the bride from her mother or groom. The ceremonial purpose of such donets is confirmed not only by the richness of the paintings and special subjects, but also by the inscriptions on the spinning wheels or the stories of local old-timers.

The forms of local spinning donets were almost perfectly worked out by the Gorodets carvers of the first half of the 19th century. They learned how to carve the bottom itself from aspen and attach a head to it for inserting a comb - spears, decorate the edges of the bottom with smooth semicircular cuts, make it the height of grace, decorating two side faces with an inlaid bird and a horse, and the other two with slushy longitudinal cuts reminiscent of the flutes of ancient columns. . However, the painters needed smooth surfaces for their work, and the edges of the bottom and the edges of the stump become smooth over time.
But having become less expressive in form, the bottoms of the second half of the 19th century flourished. like a fairy garden.
The Gorodets painter manages to write a bright bird among flowers, a black horse on a very small plane of a kopyk. When it comes to decorating the wide plane of the bottom, there is no limit to his imagination! People in fashionable costumes at that time, animals and birds, fantastic flowers, rooms - almost palace halls and streets with their motley crowd. But no matter how fantastic the ideas of the master are, a certain order, custom, canon always reigns in his painting. And according to this custom, he divides the oblong surface of the bottom into three tiers. Upper, near the stump, usually slightly larger than the lower; the ornamental frieze separates both parts. It can consist of multi-colored stripes, or it can become a lush garland of flowers or a branch with berries. It depends only on the taste of the master whether to write all the bottoms on the same background or make the background different for the upper and lower parts of the composition. Often there are bottoms written on a favorite single golden-yellow background, but it also happens like this: the top mark is orange, and the bottom one is bright crimson.
The hallmarks differed not only in background color, but also in plots. In the upper part of the bottom, the master often turned to the world of people, while in the lower part there was the realm of nature - images of animals or plants. But this is only the general scheme for constructing the painting of the classical donets, and the masters did not always follow it unquestioningly. The unique charm of Gorodets painting is precisely in the constant deviation from the canon, in the feeling of creative freedom of each master.
Next to an elegant painted spinning wheel, there was usually a painted urinal - a box for spindles and "lobes". (“A lobe” is a flax tow prepared for yarn.) For the manufacture of urinals in the spring, better in damp windy weather, they prepared a linden bast origin, cut it into strips of the desired size, steamed it, folded it, and then sewed it in a special way - with a “lock” using a thin and strong pine root. From this sewn strip of bast, the base of an oblong oval box was obtained, to which a smooth wooden bottom was subsequently attached. — and the urinal was ready.

The rounded shape of urinals, bast boxes or baskets made it possible to unfold the image into a kind of frieze ribbon, to tell a whole story, as if extended in time. It could be a picturesque story about a hunt, a wedding, gatherings, about the busy movement of steamers on the Volga. The frieze could be continuous, or it could consist of several episodes or, as the old icon painters used to say, hallmarks.
The most common was the following order of decorating the mochssnik: two plot scenes - along the longitudinal sides
boxes, two ornamental motifs - on the end. One scene was separated from the other by a vertical strip of typical Gorodets ornament - string, bindweed, crossed brackets.
It would seem that it would have been much more convenient to paint a rose, a garland of flowers, or another ornamental motif on a small space on the wall of the urinal, but the Uzol artist argued here that without depicting scenes of modern life, there is no Gorodets painting. How amazingly he used the expressiveness of the poses and gestures of his characters, but truly directorially built almost theatrical mise-en-scenes. There is a lot to learn here for the colorist as well. In the painting of the “Spinner” from the collection of the Gorodetsky Historical and Art Museum Complex, the author uses an extremely beautiful color scheme. Against a blue background, he paints a scene of village gatherings and a scene of a date for young people, using orange-pink, green, black and white colors.
The images on the end sides of the urinals often had a deep meaning. Such, for example, is a favorite motif in Gorodets painting - the image of a clock in a rich ornamental frame. The figure of an elderly woman, the mother of the bride or groom, on the other end of the urinal, as it were, also reminds of the inexorable passage of time. These images are another confirmation that urinals, like spinning wheels, were not just everyday peasant things, but were associated with village rituals and holidays, the most important of which was a wedding.

Kryukov's workshop. Mochesnik. Late 19th - early 20th century SPGIHMZ

No matter how good urinals and baskets are, it’s hard for them to argue with beauty and originality with painted chairs - nurses and wheelchairs (the so-called chairs with wheels attached to them).
Gorodets chairs, depending on the size, were intended for the children themselves and for their dolls. This is a special area of creativity for Gorodets artists - work on decorating an object of complex three-dimensional shape. Turned wheelchairs - children's chairs on wheels - were made in the villages of Repino and Koskovo, and bent chairs were made by peasants in Nikulin and Skolzikhino. For one wheelchair, more than three dozen parts were machined from aspen or birch. With the help of wooden axles and spikes, without nails or glue, these parts were connected so firmly that even today they remain intact and unharmed.
However, such chairs and wheelchairs became truly Gorodetsky only when they were painted on a crimson, brown, yellow, blue or black background. First, the seat was painted - a small plane about 20 × 20 cm in size, sometimes in the shape of a trapezoid. This part of the work was considered the most difficult and responsible. The most common motif here is a branch with berries and small leaves, painted diagonally across the plane. A special role was played by whitening strokes - karazzhivka, thanks to which the branch came to life, gained graphic clarity, but did not lose its picturesqueness. The master's love for the freedom and virtuosity of the whitening stroke was especially evident in the frame of the seat of the chair and the composition on its back - the visor.
At the disposal of the artist was only a narrow, about 2.5 cm wide, frame-frame and a small board of the back - no more than 20 × 8 cm. The master with a light stroke ran around the square, in the center
which a branch, a flower, a cat, a boy riding a dog, or another funny story has already been written. White brackets, brackets with a stroke in the middle of each hole, an intricate string or just a white stroke could serve as a frame.

Birds or animals often appear on Gorodets chairs. Masters often painted lying, curled up cats, but they especially loved proudly sitting, surrounded by flowers and berries. Black, gray and bright red cats appear not only on chairs, but also on urinals, baskets.
It would seem absurd - a portrait on the seat of a toy chair! But from the fact of the existence of such works will not go anywhere. This is how images of ladies in smart dresses, with bows on their shoulders, carrying buckets of water on the yokes, or an image of a dignified couple walking around, where the gentleman was certainly “at the clock”, the signature under which could be a local ditty of the beginning XX century:
I asked, "What time is it?"
He said, "The ninth hour."
I asked: "Who do you love?"
He said, "Of course you!"
There are many such analogies with ditties, but if the ditty is always mischievous and fleeting, then the Gorodets ceremonial portrait, although comical, is majestic in its own way. In it, the influence of a provincial merchant portrait is palpable. Undoubtedly, the works of the first Nizhny Novgorod and Gorodets photographers also had their influence on this genre.
A canon, a kind of typical composition, has developed in the Gorodets portrait. The master also designated part of the furnishings of the house, drawing a high arched window with an intricate binding. Much attention was paid to other details of the interior - a table on carved patterned legs, a large flowerpot with flowers, sometimes a part of the patterned floor, divided into squares of parquet, was depicted.

In books written about Gorodets painting, it was often said that its style was undoubtedly associated with the folk picture-lubok. But with what kind of splint? The heyday of the Russian lubok picture - hand-painted wooden and copper favours - fell on the end of the 18th - first half of the 19th century. In the second half of the 19th century, this art began to decline, and it was replaced by the so-called lubok-type products. In the printing houses of Moscow and St. Petersburg, oleographs and “prostoviki” of very poor artistic quality were printed - lithographs painted by hand by urban artisans, recent immigrants from peasants. They depicted contemporary events, famous people, for example. then the well-known general Skobelev, fairy tales, scenes of village life, feasts of merchants in rich restaurants. These pictures were so artistically insignificant that none of the art historians even wanted to understand them. On the other hand, as it turned out, the Gorodets masters looked at them “with all their eyes” and looked at all in vain: they needed to learn how to write scenes of today's life, the buyer demanded from them that the plots, scenes of the life of the townspeople and the Volga merchants, knowledge of the furnishings of the houses and modern pretty complex women's and men's costume. Late splint turned out to be an excellent auxiliary material, a kind of cheat sheet. And the talent of the Gorodets craftsmen was to be able to use this working material as nothing more than a hint. They peeped from urban artisans techniques, principles for solving space, amusing details and rethought them as genuine artists who masterfully wielded a brush.

It is difficult for a modern person to believe the memories of the old masters that they worked by the light of a kerosene lamp for 14-16 hours daily, creating works of such beauty, freshness and artistry that it would never occur to talk about some kind of forced labor. It really was a great work, but a passionate, creative work, full of desire to express its artistic essence.
Bright, talented artists created a picturesque craft. Sidor Konovalov was not like the brothers A.V. and L.V. Melnikovs. I.A. Mazin painted flowers and herbs in a completely different way. The second half of the 19th century in the Uzolskaya valley passed under the sign of such a bright and varied flowering of Gorodets painting that literally each of the masters deserves a detailed story about his work.
If for the masters of the earliest times S. Konovalov and the Melnikov brothers it was characteristic, as it were, to paint a pre-applied drawing, then the second, later, stage in the development of painting was truly picturesque. This second, picturesque, stage is largely determined by the works of I.A. Mazin and F.S. Krasnoyarov. I.A. Mazin, a student of S. Konovalov, was, of course, one of the most talented Gorodets masters. His methods of constructing plot and ornamental compositions are extremely diverse. He can also write a simple everyday scene, like the one called "Serezha the Shepherd", depicting a date for a rural couple under a tree, or he can build a complex multi-figure composition, which the master himself entitled "Gift to the daughter-in-law from the mother-in-law."

The subjects chosen by him also corresponded to Krasnoyarov's creative temperament. More often than others, he depicted racing troikas, horsemen, and military men. In his works, there are often images of soldiers and officers of the Balkan War, dressed in blue and red uniforms, which the master always painted with great attention to the smallest details.
The sales market for Gorodets products was undermined, long-term traditional ties between producers and consumers of handicraft products were broken. Even the previously beloved painted Gorodets toy was no longer bought either in Gorodets or in Nizhny Novgorod. It seemed that all the sources of the existence of the fishery had dried up.
At the same time, the 1920s were marked by the growing interest of various sections of the Russian public in folk art, in the activity of a handicraftsman. There were many reasons for this: according to the ideas of the new government, the handicraftsmen had to replenish the commodity market that was empty as a result of the ruin of industry with their products. The original products of crafts: unique Russian lace, carved and painted wood, embroidery - made it possible to enter foreign markets, promised foreign exchange earnings to the impoverished treasury.
The ideological side of the task of reviving crafts was also important - to promote the development of art in a new social environment, in a new city and a new village. Plans for the cooperation of handicraftsmen, the creation of artels were widely advertised from the highest tribunes, at various congresses and conferences, the ideas of commercial cooperation were "introduced locally" in various regions of Russia. Representatives of the old Russian intelligentsia, who understood the need to preserve the age-old cultural heritage countries.
Only in 1935 an attempt was made to unite the Gorodets masters of painting. Their vast experience, knowledge, various artistic talents were absolutely necessary for the revival of the craft. However, the ability of the old masters to work only with traditional products was also a significant obstacle in the development of a new range of decorative and utilitarian items.

In the mid-1930s, artist I.I. Oveshkov is a great connoisseur of folk art.
He put a lot of effort into recording the special techniques of each craftsman. Since the craft in those years experienced great difficulties with wood, Oveshkov suggested that the craftsmen perform part of the compositions on paper glued with carpentry glue.
On this basis, the craftsmen painted in the traditional Gorodets style with paints diluted on carpentry glue. For relatively short term Oveshkov gathered quite a large number of unique compositions of the older generation of Gorodets masters. Among these sheets were the most interesting “trips” and “tea parties” of F.S. Krasnoyarov, original compositions on the themes of the old and new life of Gorodets by I.A. Mazin, works by P.D. Kolesova, I.K. Lebedev and others. The fate of most of these sheets was unknown for a long time. An idea of them could only be obtained from copies made in the mid-1940s by the artist T.A. Mavrina. In 1997, the original drawings were found in the funds of the Nizhny Novgorod State Historical and Architectural Museum-Reserve. Highly appreciating the originality of I.A. Mazina. Gorodets toys are made flat on the front side and voluminous at the back, which gives them stability and allows them to be moved. Mazin's small sculpture, a kind of painted sculpture, seems to be one of the most successful experiences of using Gorodets painting in its new quality.

In the Kurtsevo workshop of the 1930s, craftsmen also worked on turning painted utensils, small pieces of furniture (shelves, hangers). However, many masters wanted to paint large planes, build multi-figured compositions. After all, this is what their previous long-term work has taught them. But the bottoms are finally a thing of the past, it was necessary to look for a new application for their skills. This is how a rather significant and diverse series of painted panels appeared. They were written by almost all famous Gorodets masters, choosing a wide variety of topics. Here were also field work, and rural weddings, and "excellent border guards", and views of the old Gorodetskaya street. These works are entertaining, bright in color, sometimes very decorative throughout the structure of the composition. The authors try very hard to be modern, introducing the details of a new way of life, depicting modern people. I.A. Mazin is no longer constrained by either the size of the donets, or its shape, or the Gorodets canon - a vertical two-tiered composition. Not for use in everyday life, but for the exhibition, the master writes his panel “Into the hayfield”, using the shape of a spinning bottom. The fact that in the hands of the master is now not a spinning wheel, but a kind of picture, allows him to more freely operate with space, making it deeper, introducing more elements of the landscape, which was not characteristic of traditional Gorodets painting.
The appearance of the characters also becomes different: hairstyles change, dresses become shorter. It is quite appropriate now to depict village boys in T-shirts and t-shirts of athletes.
The new time brought a lot of previously unseen things into the surrounding life, changed the very social status of folk craftsmen. After the seemingly complete decline of the fishery, in the 1930s there was hope for a better future. City residents begin to prepare for the grandiose exhibition "Folk Art" in Moscow. Recognition of the significance of their work could not but inspire these no longer young people, and they again, as in their best years begin to praise the joy of life. Strange as it may sound today, when we know the sad fates of many Gorodets residents, and the masters themselves, but even then, in the cruel thirties, they sincerely believed in goodness, remained the same “enchanted wanderers”, born in order to see all around is beautiful. Unlike the "scientific" artists of that time, who consciously carried out a social order, they were not at all cunning in their views on life at that time, preserving the major, joyful sound of the painting.

At the pre-war exhibitions of folk art, the works of Gorodets artists were exhibited more than once with great success, but, as a rule, the matter was limited to these exhibitions. The old masters failed to attract young people to their work. Of the next generation, only A.E. Konovalov and K.I. Lebedev, son of I.K. Lebedev. On the eve of the Great Patriotic War Gorodets craftsmen were forced to paint dishes “under Khokhloma” and decorate the stations of the children's railway with paintings.
The situation of the Gorodets fishery became even more complicated during the Great Patriotic War and in the first post-war years. The war claimed the lives of many craftsmen from Gorodets, their children and relatives, to whom the taste for art could have been inherited. The production of painted products has practically ceased. The first steps to revive production were made in the 1950s.
Since the 1960s, the craft has lived the life of Soviet art and industrial production with all its attributes: workshops, plans, financial indicators, concerns about raw materials and the sale of products. It was certainly something very different from the small family workshops in the Uzola valley. Another indispensable condition for the existence of this traditional painting for a hundred and fifty years now is the sincere love for it of the masters themselves, and many Nizhny Novgorod residents, and indeed all Russians, who sometimes live far from the homeland of craft.

Each of the famous Gorodets artists has their own tastes in traditional art. It is unlikely that II.A. Stolesnikov to paint the panel “Battle of Borodino”, if there were no old Gorodets “battle painter” G.L. Polyakov. There is a lot of true Gorodets humor and at the same time degree in the works of L.A. Kubatkina, V.A. Chertkova. In the works of A.V. Sokolova's ability to build a multi-figured composition, to solve the space of the interior, to write the characters in a truly Gorodets style is remarkable.
Artists of the post-war generation, the first students of A.E. Konovalov, did a great creative job, having mastered all the richness of the Gorodetsky floral ornament, revived the Gorodets plot, proved that it is possible to reveal bright creative personalities even in production conditions. Much was done by them to continue the best traditions of craft, to educate young Gorodets painters, to expand their creative horizons.
Love for Gorodets painted products, their widespread use in rural and urban life in Russia in the second half of the 19th-20th centuries is explained not only by their aesthetic qualities, but also by their excellent, highly professional technical execution. Gorodets painting has always been distinguished by strength and durability.
Today we can judge about the strength of the paint layer of the Gorodets painting, about the sophistication of its classical techniques by the fairly good preservation of products in museums and private collections: the brightness of the colors has not faded, in many cases the lacquer coating has remained intact. This is convincing evidence that both the artistic and purely handicraft side of his work were equally important for the Gorodetsky master.
The technical side of Gorodets painting includes several production cycles. Both in the old craft and in modern production, everything began with a pound of wooden products. Its purpose was to create such an even and moderate smooth surface, which would hold paints well, prevent them from spreading, would make it possible to work quickly enough, and most importantly, would preserve the beauty of a wide pictorial stroke and the elegance of graphic shading.

The most important part of the Gorodets painting skill was a good knowledge of the properties of paints, the ability to prepare them. It is unlikely that we could admire the Gorodets painting in a century and a half, if the craftsmen did not know how to fix the paint layer with the help of a varnish coating.
The technology of Gorodets writing has undergone various changes throughout its history. According to researchers, the earliest should be considered a variant of the technology borrowed from local icon painters: the technique of painting with egg tempera on gesso, a traditional ground for icon painting, composed of chalk on an adhesive basis.
It should not be forgotten that the Gorodets painting craft was not a single production - a manufactory or a factory, but a number of separate family workshops. Each had its own character of production, range of products and, naturally, with its own variants of painting technology. The difference between these options depended not only on the place of production of a particular product, but also on the time when it was created.
In recent decades, another version of work on the Gorodets plots has spread, adopted in school circles and amateur studios. This is the use of tempera or gouache both for sketches on paper and for decorating wooden products. This method can be used to master the techniques of painting at home, in an art circle or studio.
The author was lucky enough to learn the most accurate information about the traditional technology of Gorodets painting from A.E. Konovalov, a master who, as it were, embodied in himself a living connection between the past and the present of a wonderful craft. Answering my questions, A.E. Konovalov argued that the traditional classical technique of Gorodets writing was painting with glue paints. The paints were "in powder", that is, speaking modern language, in the form of dry pigments. In preparation for work, the paints were carefully rubbed with a chime, sometimes several paints were mixed during grinding, achieving a richness of color shades.

Ancient Gorodets painting is always painting “on colored backgrounds” (the appearance in the 1940s and 1950s of the so-called texture painting, that is, on unpainted wood, is not associated with artistic tradition, but with economic difficulties in the fishery). The work of the old masters on the painting of the product began precisely with the choice of the background color and the primer of the wood surface. For priming and painting the background, for example, in his favorite yellow color, the artist mixed yellow crowns with ground chalk, and then diluted the paints on wood glue, pouring them into clay bowls. As a rule, several products were pounded at once: the primer was applied in one layer and dried out rather quickly. After drying, the surface was cleaned of wood "lint" and once again covered with a layer of transparent wood glue. After the second drying, the product was ready for painting.
Paints intended for painting, previously thoroughly ground and mixed, were also diluted with glue, diluted to the density of sour cream and stirred with special wooden sticks. If the paint was too thick, it was warmed up on the stove or a little glue was added.
The first stage of painting - painting (underpainting) is the designation of the main color spots. For her, large or medium brushes, kolinsky or squirrel were used. Usually these are factory-made brushes, but it happens that they use brushes of their own knitting.
Starting to paint a floral or plot motif, the master did this, as a rule, without any preliminary drawing, at the same time clearly presenting the features of his future pattern, the nature of the ornament or genre scene.
Having finished the underpainting, the master proceeded to the second stage. Gorodets masters called it shading. With this technique, the artist gave volume to the main color spots. Minium in combination with cormorant, blue with ultramarine, pink with speckled flowers made the shapes of flowers more expressive and decorative.
Then came the third stage - revival (revival). Here, the masters needed thin brushes, as they had to apply white strokes, thin black lines, rows of small strokes and dots. They were called "grains", "pearls". Livery is a surprisingly beautiful and expressive technique that gives each form a special completeness and harmony.
At the end of the painting, the items were covered with a thin layer of boiled linseed oil, which served as a varnish that fixed the painting.

Technologists, artists, art historians of the Moscow Research Institute of Art Industry (NIIKhP) and artists of the Gorodets painting factory in the 1960s did a lot of experimental work to restore the traditional technology of Gorodets writing in modern conditions.
We will give some practical information useful to an artist who wants to get closer to traditional technology.
The surface of the product was polished with a sandpaper, then carpenter's glue boiled until completely dissolved was applied to it (at the rate of 20 g of glue per 180 ml of water). Then the product was glued a second time and dried again.
The next stage of surface preparation was a primer, immediately before which the product had to be sanded again.
To preserve the matte surface of the painting, after drying, it was covered with NTs-243 nitrocellulose varnish.
The goal of this experiment was basically achieved - in production conditions, it was possible to recreate a technology close enough to the traditional one. It seems that, if desired, it can also be used by artists who revere Gorodets classical technology. But in the conditions of an art circle or studio, self-study painting, using the old Gorodets painting technology or a variant close to it can be quite difficult.
Experience has shown that it is possible to paint using ready-made tempera or gouache. Simpler methods of priming wooden products were also quite successfully tested. Some artists glue the surface of the wood with PVA glue diluted with water, others successfully use other priming methods. One of them is as follows.
A thin layer of liquid starch paste is applied to the surface of a carpentry or turning product with a hard brush, swab or simply with the palm of your hand. In this case, it is necessary to try to apply the glue as evenly as possible, without leaving pieces of film or grains on the surface. After the paste dries, you should lightly walk on the surface of the product with sandpaper, removing irregularities. After the adhesive primer, the background is painted with gouache or tempera. In this case, you can use two ways to create a colored background: the first is to cover the surface of the tree with a dense layer of paint; the second is to only lightly tint the surface of the wood with liquid paint, without covering the texture of the wood.
Paints for painting must be prepared very carefully. For each color, prepare a small cup or use commercially available small watercolor "palettes" with small recesses for different colors of paint and a large container for mixing paints. With a small amount of work, gouache of each color should be ground with water and mixed with a wooden or plastic spatula to the consistency of liquid sour cream without lumps or grains.

Mochesnik. Late 19th - early 20th century NGILMZ. Museum of Historical and Artistic Crafts of the Nizhny Novgorod Region.

When preparing for work, it is necessary to foresee in advance what color of paint will be needed for painting, shading, and tinting.
Next to the dark green color - chromium oxide - you should place a lighter green, make up a pink color - for example, kraplak diluted with white, etc.
The artist's workplace should also have a container with water for diluting paints and washing brushes, a stand for brushes of various sizes. Such coasters, which are small triangular bars with a series of shallow grooves for brushes, can be made independently, but you can also use those that are sold in stores and are usually ceramic. A certain order in the workplace allows you not to scatter attention, not to be distracted from the main artistic task.
Earlier it was already said that experienced Gorodets craftsmen work for the most part without a preliminary drawing. This is especially true of traditional compositions, which the masters know, as they say, by heart. It was about such people that Leskovsky Lefty said that they had “shooting eyes”. However, it would be wrong to build work into a principle without a preliminary drawing.
I had to see quite a few works of the early 20th century, where traces of a preliminary basting with a pencil were visible. Fragments of a preliminary drawing are often visible on many works by masters of the 1920s and 1930s that are new in terms of plot.
Preliminary drawings only outlined the main features of the composition and, as it were, gave the artist more confidence. However, when painting, they were never followed literally. As a rule, drawing was necessary for mastering new themes and new forms. contemporary artists Gorodets, being able and loving to work directly with wood, sometimes use not only preparatory drawings to develop new plots, but also sketches in color, done in watercolor or gouache on paper. It is thought that on initial stage work, a preliminary sketch on paper or a thin pencil outline of the main figures, flower shapes, interior details applied directly to the tree will not interfere with the novice master of painting.

The first works of an artist who masters the basics of Gorodets painting are flat carpentry, for example, small cutting boards. Having primed such a plank with starch paste, as described above, after drying and lightly sanding it, paint is applied to the surface of the color that best suits the plan. Such a background can be yellow or orange, light brown or dark red. Here I would like to warn the novice master from typical mistake- haste. No matter how quickly gouache or tempera dries, the background must be allowed to dry as best as possible. Set aside the painted boards for a few hours, and then you will have a guarantee that the next stage of work - painting - will be successful. In the same way, it is necessary to dry each layer of painting well.
It should be noted that Gorodets painting is beautiful and expressive at all its stages. No wonder the audience, being at the exhibition next to the working master, admires, looking at the still far from finished composition, and even asks the artist to stop at the shading stage. The artist perfectly understands the charm of an unfinished work, but he also understands that it is impossible to stop at this stage, since Gorodets painting without lovely light whitewash does not have that artistic completeness for which connoisseurs appreciate it so much. Lighting is done with whitewash and black soot paint, work with which requires special care and caution, subtlety and a sense of proportion. Therefore, as already mentioned, the brushes are chosen the thinnest, allowing the master to draw graceful lines, perform curved strokes with pressure or light shading.

Often you recognize the hand of this or that master by the flair: it shows not only the skill, but also the artistic temperament, the manner of work, even the emotional mood of the master.
White and black thin lines, emphasizing the contours of human figures, images of animals, fragments of flower forms, give the composition a special elegance. A picturesque spot and a graphic touch not only coexist in Gorodets painting on an equal footing, but also perfectly complement each other, creating an integral decorative picture. A.E. Konovalov emphasized the importance of animation in Gorodets painting.
After completing all the stages of painting, from painting to painting, you should again give the work enough time to dry, and only after making sure that the paint has dried well, fix the painting with varnish.
Particular attention should be paid to the fragments of the painting, made in white.
These are white dots - "pearls", stamens of flowers, hatching of various patterns. Sometimes, when painting, the details written in white turn out to be dense, “pasty”. When using whitewash on the faces and hands of the characters, it is necessary to apply whitewash in several layers. If these fragments of the painting are not allowed to dry completely, then when coated with a rather liquid varnish, they can be damaged. Correcting these errors is very difficult, almost impossible.
The final operation - coating the finished composition with varnish - is very responsible. The most successful and organic for this type of painting is a lacquer coating that does not give a bright shine, retains colorful combinations, and does not introduce unnecessary yellowness into the white color. The old masters covered the painting with a layer of drying oil - well-boiled linseed oil. Pure transparent drying oil retained the color of the paints and was so strong that it did not require repeated coating, which, in turn, made it possible to preserve the special velvety of the picturesque surface. But the drying oil coating went away along with the classical period of Gorodets painting.
When working with oil paints, which was practiced in the field for quite a long time (approximately from the second half of the 1930s to the end of the 1970s), the painting was covered with colorless oil-resin varnishes of industrial production, as well as with pentaphthalic varnishes PF-283/4C and PF 231. Under production conditions, varnishing was carried out in one step by pneumatic spraying.

In the conditions of a workshop, art studio or circle, amateur artists can also use these varnishes. They allow you to preserve the expressiveness of color when painting with tempera or gouache. Coating methods may vary. You can adapt a household spray gun, or you can work with a brush. With both methods of coating, the varnish must be sufficiently thin, and some experience is needed to achieve an even and smooth coating, avoiding streaks and uneven varnish.
Repeated varnishing is undesirable, since even colorless varnishes, when applied in a thick layer, affect the color of the paints, make the painting darker, less bright and decorative.
In conclusion, it must be emphasized that these general rules Gorodets technologies have author's variants. Each of the masters of painting has many of his own devices, creative techniques, habits, which determine the uniqueness of the artist's handwriting. Therefore, knowing the basics of the traditional Gorodets technology, its variants that have arisen in the course of the development of the craft, each of those who wish to join this art is free to choose those technological methods that best suit their creative individuality.
Currently, Gorodets painting is of such great public interest, so much desire and experienced and just beginning artists to comprehend its secrets, that more and more people are eager to learn the details of the history, technology, techniques and means of artistic expression of this art, the features of the work of its most outstanding masters.

Many circles and studios will be created, there are many schools and even kindergartens, where they introduce the basics of painting. This speaks of creative aspirations, of the kinship of modern people with the artistic culture of distant ancestors, but there is also a hidden danger of simplifying painting, blurring its true deep traditions. There are many different manuals in which the authors try to teach their readers some knowledge about folk painting, in particular Gorodets. Unfortunately, the main drawback of these manuals is amateurism, an attempt to transfer experience "through third parties", the absence of direct creative contacts with the most experienced Gorodets masters.
Nowadays, many celebrities - musicians, singers, drama artists open their schools in different cities of the world, hold creative seminars, calling them "master classes". It is not shameful for Gorodets virtuosos to directly, directly turn to lovers of Gorodets painting with a display of their vast and diverse creative experience.
On the pages of this book, his "master class" is conducted by a wonderful Gorodets master, laureate of the State Prize of Russia named after I.E. Repina Alexandra Vasilievna Sokolova. She went through the school of old Gorodets masters, worked for many years next to A.E. Konovalov, and today heads a large creative team. But above all, she is a wonderful, original artist, subtly feeling all the features of Gorodets painting, the traditional sequence of elements: from simple to the most complex. She inherited from her predecessors the feeling decorative composition, knows the intricacies of working with wooden products of various shapes, features of working with different types paints and varnishes. The experience of such a master is invaluable for new generations of artists.
It is difficult to designate the techniques of this type of folk brush painting with the word “technical”: they are so connected not with technology in its usual sense, but with a skillful human hand, its ability to move smoothly and flexibly, rhythmically and assertively, and most importantly, deeply meaningful and at that same time emotionally.
It is with the transfer of the unique Gorodets experience of owning a brush that A.V. Sokolov, leading us step by step from the simplest to the most complex in the Gorodets painting art.

Old Gorodets masters. From left to right Ignatii Andreevich Mazin, Fedor Semenovich Krasnoyarov, Ignatii Klementievich Lebedev

Grebenkina Irina Nikolaevna
Getting acquainted with Gorodets painting

To accomplish the tasks of aesthetic education of preschoolers, the Childhood program recommends referring to these wonderful examples of Russian applied arts. Decorative and applied art enriches the creative aspirations of children to transform the world, develops in children non-standard thinking, freedom, emancipation, individuality, the ability to peer and observe, as well as to see novelty and elements of fabulousness in real objects of decorative and applied art. In the process of creating objects of arts and crafts, children consolidate their knowledge of the standards of form and color, form clear and fairly complete ideas about objects of arts and crafts in life.

But in order to meet children with different types of Russian applied art, the teacher should have an idea about the history of occurrence, features murals, have a selection of practical material - poems, games, albums with product samples.

I present practical material on familiarization of children with Gorodets painting.

History and features Gorodets painting.

Gorodets - a city in the Nizhny Novgorod Zavolzhye, on the left bank of the Volga. He belongs to the oldest Russian fortress cities. Gorodets- the birthplace of a wide variety of crafts. Gorodets painting as such arises approximately in the middle of the nineteenth century, when there is a transition from inlaid donets (the wide part of the spinning wheel that served as a seat) to their murals. At the same time, a tradition arose to sign proverbs and sayings on the works. (which is typical for lubok) or indicate their authorship.

He was famous for woodcarving ( "deaf" house carving, the manufacture of donets inlaid with bog oak (a board on which a spinner sits) spinning wheel, gorodets painting, carved gingerbread boards.

Dominant color Gorodets murals or bright yellow chrome or cinnabar. They are usually the dominant color, the background of the whole paintings in general; blue, green and sometimes "whitewashed" tones (pink, blue) used to write a pattern, black and white - to work out the details. Bright, concise Gorodets painting(genre scenes, figurines of horses, roosters, floral patterns, made with a free stroke with white and black graphic stroke, decorated spinning wheels, furniture, shutters, doors.

Peculiarities Gorodets painting - clean, bright colors, a clear contour, white strokes that create a conditional volume and picturesqueness. Gorodetsky masters depict not only floral ornaments, fairy-tale characters, but also genre scenes. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the fishery was revived. An artel has been operating since 1938, a factory has been operating since 1960 " Gorodets painting".

TECHNIQUE OF PERFORMANCE GORODETSK PAINTING

materials: Tempera. You can use gouache with the addition of PVA glue.

Each primary color is made up of two shade: one is whitened, the other is more saturated.

Order of execution murals:

BUT) painting performed directly on a wooden base or the base is primed with yellow, red, black colors.

B) On the selected for murals on a cutting board or the surface of another object, the composition of the future pattern is outlined with thin lines in pencil. The main thing is to outline the location and size of the main, brightest spots - for example, flowers. These are the nodes of the composition. Medium details - unblown buds - connect large details to each other; small ones - twigs, leaves - complement the theme and have little effect on the overall composition.

C) At the nodes of the composition, as a rule, spots of regular round shape are applied with a wide brush - the base of the flower.

D) Thin strokes are applied over light spots with a second, darker color scheme of the same shade, for example, blue on blue - a stroke. Outline stroke - drawing, depicts the contours of the flower petals. At the same stage, leaflets are depicted between large elements, the shape of which is obtained with two or three brush strokes.

All painting comprises elements: underpainting circles, brackets, drops, dots, arcs, spirals, strokes.

D) The final stage murals- drawing strokes and dots with black and white paint. This approach is called "quickly" and gives the work a finished look. It is carried out with the thinnest brush.

E) After the tempera has dried, the product can be coated with a colorless varnish.

MOTIVES GORODETSK PAINTING.

The most common motives are:

flowers - roses, cupavki with symmetrical leaves:

animals - horse, bird.

"Tree of Life"- a traditional story that personifies nature. On both sides "tree", horses or birds can be depicted.

Riders, carriages, ladies, soldiers, cavaliers, dogs are traditional for the plot. Gorodets painting.

COMPOSITION

There are three types of composition Gorodets painting:

floral painting;

floral painting with the inclusion of a motive "horse" and "bird";

plot painting.

Such a division is conditional, since the plot painting does not do without floral motifs, it is diverse in terms of construction schemes. And even if the products gorodets painting made on the basis of the same composition, but in different colors, you can not immediately catch the similarity.

Floral painting

This type is most often used, it is the easiest to perform. In a less complex version, a single flower with leaves diverging from it can be depicted at work. In a more complex version, for example, a strip of floral ornament is often depicted on the side walls, and the lid is decorated with flowers inscribed in a circle. On the lids of bread bins, flowers are usually arranged in a rectangle or rhombus.

In floral ornament, the following most common types can be distinguished ornament:

"Bouquet"- shown symmetrically. Usually written on cutting boards or dishes.

"Garland"- is a variety "bouquet" when one or two large flowers are located in the center, smaller flowers with leaves diverge from them to the sides. They can fit into a circle, stripe, crescent (on corner screensavers). This type flower ornament compositions are most often used when cutting board painting, bread bins, caskets, dishes, children's furniture.

"Rhombus"- one of the options "fairy lights" when one or more flowers are written in the center, forming the center, and the buds and leaves, gradually decreasing towards the tops of the rhombus, are located along its imaginary edges. This flower arrangement can most often be seen on rectangular cutting boards, chests, benches, cabinet doors, and bread boxes.

"Flower Stripe"- preserved in Gorodetsky fishing from painted spinning wheels, where she shared the upper and lower tiers. Depending on what product it is written on, it can be a repeating ribbon composition of flowers of the same size, separated by pairs of leaves, or the same composition in which alternate: flowers of the same size, but different in pattern; flowers of the same size, but different in color; flowers, different in pattern, color and size. Such ornamental stripes are usually used for murals of bulk products such as round boxes. Narrative compositions encircle the narrow ornamental strip. The wider stripe is the middle tier in the three tier composition.

"Wreath"- reminds "flower band", but only closed along the edge of the dish or the lid of the box. Floral arrangements are usually symmetrical in the arrangement of motifs and color distribution.

Floral arrangement with motif included "horse" and "bird".

Just like in flower murals, in products with the image of a horse and a bird, motifs can be symmetrical. They are located on the sides of a flowering tree or inside a flower garland. Sometimes, among the symmetrically written floral ornament, there are two birds, asymmetrical in pattern, sometimes different in color. Sometimes, when a master performs a composition of several objects (for example, cutting boards), symmetry manifests itself in the composition of the two extreme ones. On the extreme boards, various flower motifs can be depicted, or two motive: "rooster" and "hen".

Note: Images "rooster" and "horse" are symbols of the sun, wishes of happiness. Images "rooster" and "hens" symbolizes family well-being, wishing the family many children.

Storyline painting

performed on large products: panels, chests and large boxes, cutting boards and dishes. The composition is similar to the composition of gift spinning wheels, as then: painting in two or three tiers (in the upper part the main plot is written with a feast, date, walk, departure, etc., in the lower part - the plots help to reveal this topic). The middle part separating the tiers is presented in the form of a flower strip. Another is possible option: Shows the main story with a flower band around it.

Interior: scenes of a feast, tea drinking, weddings are performed against the background of a window with the obligatory inclusion of a table. The table is filled with cups, a samovar or a vase of flowers (symbol of wealth and prosperity). Curtains and clocks can be included in the composition.

People's faces are always turned towards the viewer. Very rarely there are images deployed in three quarters.

Exterior: houses with carved shutters and architraves, with chimneys decorated with carved roosters, wells with roofs decorated with horses' heads. Most often, the scenes of festivities, trips and dates are not divided into parts. Entire streets with houses, fences, churches, plant motifs in the form of trees.

Often, next to the main characters, you can find images of animals - dogs, cats, roosters, chickens. With this construction of the plot, the main characters are depicted on foreground, larger than the secondary ones, they are often highlighted in color.

Chastushki about gorodets

Oh, Russia, you, Russia.

Glory has not diminished

Gorodets, you, Gorodets

She became famous all over the world.

Our Russia is great

And our people are talented.

About Russia native craftsmen

The whole world is talking

Have fun our kindergarten,

No more fun guys!

We are with a smile on our face

We will sing to you about gorodets.

Gorodets patterns,

What a joy for the eyes.

Craftsmen grow up

Maybe among us.

Who draws Gorodets -

Oh, what a fine fellow he is!

And leaves and flowers

It's all about beauty!

Leaves, turtledoves and horses,

Roosters, starlings, flowers...

Gorodets patterns

Unprecedented beauty.

Where are the buckets, rocking horses

Very joyful tones

These are all the works of the beautiful

Gorodets masters.

We painted flowers

Unprecedented beauty

That beauty has no end

It's all from gorodets!

Gorodets horses,

Well done horses.

turned the leg.

Proudly bent the neck

Gorodets flowers

Wonder how good.

They delight the soul

And they are looking at you and me.

And I'm good too

I also go to Gorodets.

And when I get back -

I will decorate the kindergarten!

Gorodets, Yes, Gorodets,

Who from there - well done!

Welcome to Kindergarten

To teach children to draw.

Artistic word about gorodets.

Gorodets painting How can we not know her.

Here and hot horses, valiant to become.

There are bouquets here that cannot be described.

Here such plots, what can not be said in a fairy tale.

Yellow evening, black horse,

And kupavki, like fire,

Birds look from the casket -

Miracle- painting of Gorodets!

L. Kulikova.

Our painted boards

Look at these.

We all want to show you

And describe in detail.

By roses and cups

Gorodetsky galloping horse,

And all painted with flowers,

How handsome he is.

Three young girls

They stand under the roses.

“Where are the daring boys?”

They look in all directions.

Here on Petrushka street

He rides on a horse.

Faithful dog his obedient

Runs after the groom.

I. V. Kadukhina

"Happy Gorodets»

Is on the Volga ancient city,

By name - Gorodets.

Famous throughout Russia

His painted, creator.

Bouquets open up

Bright colors of grief.

Miracle - the birds flutter there,

As if in a fairy tale calling us.

If you look at the boards

You will see miracles!

Gorodetsky patterns subtly brought out by hand!

Gorodetsky horse runs -

The whole earth beneath him trembles!

Miracle - the birds flutter there,

And the water lilies are blooming!

As if calling us into a fairy tale!

Gorodets flowers

Wonder how good.

They delight the soul

And they are looking at you and me.

The boards are made of linden,

And spinning wheels, and horses ...

painted with flowers,

It's like they're half-assed.

Riders gallop there,

Firebirds are flying high.

And black and white dots

Glitter in the sun.

Oh, Russia, you, Russia,

Glory has not diminished

Gorodets, you, Gorodets

She became famous all over the world.

Didactic game « Gorodets patterns»

Target: Strengthen children's ability to compose Gorodets patterns, recognize elements murals, remember the order of the pattern, choose your own color and shade for it, develop imagination, the ability to use the knowledge gained to compose a composition.

Material and equipment. stencils Gorodets paper products yellow color(chopping boards, dishes, etc., a set of elements Gorodets painting(paper stencils)

Game rule. Children are offered a set of plant elements and figures of a horse and a bird. They must lay out the pattern on the stencil using the applique method.

Sources: http://demiart.ru/forum/index.php?showtopic=22220 http://festival.1september.ru/articles/

[email protected] 410122/

http://www.1-kvazar.ru/u_gorodets.htm

Moran A. History of arts and crafts. - M., 1986.

Utkin P. I., Koroleva N. S. "Folk art crafts"

The significance of folk crafts in Russia for revealing the features of life, the artistic vision of the world, the Russian people is very great. The famous Gorodets painting is one of the brightest examples of the original creativity of the people.

Gorodets painting. The history of the fishery

In the middle of the 18th century, the first peasant artels began to appear in Russia, producing simple dishes and household items. The most popular items were donets for spinning wheels and toys, which were carved from wood, decorated with carvings and taken to the fair in the village of Gorodets. One of the main decorations for items was wood inlay. The cut out elements were inserted into the prepared recesses, and thus a convex original ornament was created on the surface. Later, the elements of the ornament began to be tinted and colored, and then the complex inlay was completely replaced by painting. So, on the lower Volga, in the villages with capacious Russian names Khlebaikha, Boyarskoye, Savino, Koskovo, the Gorodets craft arose, the center of which was the village, and now the city of Gorodets.

Gorodets painting, whose history continued to develop throughout the 19th century, gained wide popularity at the beginning of the 20th century, when venerable craftsmen organized an artel, which in Soviet times became a Gorodets painting factory, expanding the range of wooden products decorated with characteristic picturesque ornaments. Masters of Gorodets painting painted children's furniture, kitchen utensils, jewelry boxes, and much more.

Characteristic features of Gorodets painting

Gorodets painting borrowed elements of its uncomplicated subjects from rural life. The specific free stroke of the brush, with characteristic pointed details, somewhat similar to the wood carvings that they once complemented with color, clearly testify to the origins of this art.

The main attention of Gorodets artists is attracted by genre scenes from rural and urban provincial life: Sunday festivities of youth, peasants with accordions in striped trousers and chrome boots, brightly dressed young ladies, like dancing horses and important riders akimbo. Images attract with their childish naivety, festive theatricality, which is often emphasized by special techniques, for example, a curtain painted on the sides of the picture, as if parted in front of the audience. Gorodets masters love to depict flower arrangements in the form of intertwined garlands or large rosettes scattered throughout the field. The most favorite motifs in painting are roosters with belligerently flowing tails, and surprisingly graceful dancing horses in festive harness.

Gorodets painting is characterized by bright rich colors. Favorite colors: red, emerald green, black, blue, juicy blue and white. Shading effects are achieved by whitening the primary colors, which adds expression to the pattern. The coloring of the picture is based on contrast. Bright is the white or black contour stroke of individual elements.

Masters of folk crafts draw without preliminary sketches, broadly and juicy applying strokes one after another immediately to the product, using certain, strictly fixed writing techniques. Layer after layer, a dynamic, bright, unique pattern is created. Perhaps this is the main feature of folk art.

The history of Gorodets craft continues. Modern masters at the factory in Gorodets, creations of amazing beauty are created. Many of them are award winners. I.E. Repin, and their products adorn museum and exhibition halls. Among the famous Gorodets artists can be called A.E. Konovalova, L.F. Bespalov, F.N. Kasatov, A.V. Sokolov and others.

Women's Portal Flero