Tasteful Folk Art

We hope everyone will join us this week for another taste-tempting Pathfinder Produce fresh fruits and vegetable market at the Village Commons, Thursday, June 25, from 1 to 5 p.m.  Our summer harvest is starting to roll in!

Thursday is also Graduation Day at Pathfinder School!  We’re very proud of all our students who are completing another year of learning including the four members of the Class of 2016.  Congratulations to all area high school graduates and their families, and best wishes for fun celebrations and happy memories. 

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This past weekend, I got to spend an hour in the Pathfinder Art Studio, which always recharges my batteries and lets me enjoy the latest works by our very talented Village artists.  The “Over 21” landscape painting class, part of our adult education courses open to all, had gathered for its last session, and our Art Specialist Diane McNeil was working with two gifted folk artists, Anja and Doris.

Both were engaged in painting country scenes:  Anja was painting a winter barn, one of her favorite themes.  Doris’ painting was of a historic photo of the Ontario & Western roundhouse in Edmeston, which was used to direct trains on the proper spur during the heyday of train travel in Central New York.

Diane had brought in some of her paintings to share, including two hand saws painted with rustic scenes.  Our little group soon started talking about historic decorative techniques, and theorem painting came up.  Theorem painting is the art of making stencils to create paintings on velvet or heavy paper; it first came to prominence in England at the turn of the 19th century, according to Wikipedia, and was taught as part of young girls’ education and social refinement in the early 1800s.

To make a theorem, an artist creates a number of stencils, and by overlaying several stencils, the designs take on a three dimensional quality. Popular historic scenes focused on fruit and flowers, and there are many images to see on the internet.  More information is found in this article from Early American Life Magazine (Dec. 2009) at  www.gregorylefever.com.

Why were fruits such a popular subject?  I suspect because they are easy to render and model through the stencil technique, and that a bounty of fruit would speak both to being an industrious farmer and hopes for prosperity.  More on traditional symbol meetings can be found at Easy Oil Painting Techniques. 

Some art historians spout about how earlier Renaissance painters, like the flamboyant Caravaggio, would place fruit in paintings as fertility symbols; I say, sometimes an apple is just an apple.  While early American girls may not have known about Italian Renaissance art, the popularity of fruit themes from the 1400-1600s would’ve filtered into the decorative arts in 200 years.  (Also, there were many northern European Old Master still lifes of fruit that would’ve influenced American decorative arts).  The Purdue University School of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture offers an interesting article on the varieties of fruit Caravaggio painted.

Until next time, enjoy the best of summer fruits, appreciate some art, and enjoy!

Lori