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by Dan Burnstein, Staff Writer
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History
Naïve art and folk art are easy to recognize but difficult to define. Naïve art is made by (or in the manner of) painters without formal schooling in art. What naïve painters lack in conventional expertise, with respect to perspective and representational style, is made up for with freshness and simplicity. Naïve art's greatest acknowledged master is Henri Rousseau (French, 1844-1910), whose paintings now hang in New York's Museum of Modern Art, though he took up painting at the age of 40 and died penniless.
Folk artists can be described as naïve as well. The difference is that folk art exhibits a traditional and regional style. Grandma Moses (1860-1961) painted scenes of everyday life on her upstate New York farm that are among the most popular and famous works of American folk art.
Other types of art that are often categorized together with naïve and folk art are primitive art, which is often made for ritual purposes, and outsider art, which includes the art of children and the insane.
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Subject
The subjects of naïve and folk art are diverse, but they are generally unpretentious and literal-minded. In Janna Sokova's The Big Mushroom, the artist very plainly illustrates a story of villagers coming to admire the large mushroom she found one day.
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Common Motifs
Images of local people at festive occasions or engaged in everyday activities are common motifs in naïve/folk art, as are animals. The abundance of activity in Sokova's painting includes a wedding along with villagers farming, fishing, carrying water, and going about their workaday business.
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Composition
Unrealistic, or "non-scientific," perspective is key to defining naïve and folk painting. As in A Big Mushroom, perspective and scale are nearly always skewed. Notice how small the rider seems in comparison to his horse, and how the house in the upper-right corner appears to be perched over a steep slope.
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Color
Bright, solid areas of color are found in most naïve/folk pictures. The bright colors add festivity to the scene, while solid areas of color, as opposed to varied shades of dark and light, have a flattening effect.
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Brushstrokes
The naïve/folk artist tends to delineate forms and figures with hard lines to separate them from their surroundings. At the same time, paint handling can be somewhat sloppy, but this only adds to the rustic effect. This is in contrast to many other painters, who hide their brushstrokes in their attempts to achieve realism.
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See more naïve/folk art on PaintingsDIRECT.com.
Other QuickSketches:
Realism,
Impressionism,
Expressionism,
Cubism,
Surrealism,
Pop Art,
Minimalism, and
Abstract Art
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