Three other schools

Palekh, Mstyora and Kholui were originally the famous schools of icon painting in Russia for many years but after the October revolution and the formation of The Soviet Union religion was prohibited in the country and all the schools had to stop their craft. But, they wanted to keep the tradition of icon painting even in that tough period of time and that’s why they decided to paint boxes in their own style as they saw a good example of Fedoskino school.

Initially they made boxes of wood but this material is not good enough as papier-mâché. Wood is really fragile after the temperature drop and besides that it can easily crack after a contact with water. So, after having bad experience they found out the secret of papier-mâché as well and became the three other centres of this famous lacquer miniature handicraft.

The main differences with the Fedoskino school are:

- they use tempera paint;

- the image isn’t realistic and has no perspective.

PALEKH

Main features:

- the image is painted on the black background and it is not painted in most cases (an artist tries to keep the black background);

- the image of people is similar to the image of saints in the Russian orthodox icon painting (long faces, bodies, arms and legs + faces are the same as on the icons);

- just some traditional icon-painting colors are used such as red, blue, green and yellow;

- each detail of the clothes is fine painted and covered with the gold paint that’s why the boxes of the school are rather shiny;

- the religious theme nowadays is back and that’s why you can see it on the major part of the Palekh boxes;

- main themes are troika, people’s life, fairy tales, religious motifs and icons.

There are some exceptions such as a box 'Village' which is painted in more realistic style and in more Fedoskino-style with the using of marble technique. Anyway, the main features of the school are kept in this box as well.

KHOLUI

Main features:

- the image is painted on the black background as well but the most part of it is painted;

- the light and pastel colors are used in the painting of boxes;

- in most cases it is used a special way of painting which looks like curls (it is usually seen in the waves of the sea, clouds, horse tails in troika theme, snow, etc.);

- each detail of the clothes is fine painted as well but it is NOT covered with gold paint – this is the main difference with Palekh);

- sometimes sea-shells are also used as the top of the box but the difference with Fedoskino school is that Kholui artists use some more various materials as well such as pearls and smaller sea-shells in decoration;

- there is a special technique called montage or collage technique that is usually used in the city view theme. The idea of this technique is that an artist paint all main attractions of a city/town (which can be situated in different parts of a city/town) on a box making a collage / it can be used with the fairy tail theme as well when an artist paint all main events and characters of a fairy tale on a box;

- main themes are troika, fairy tales, people’s life, animals, city views and architecture.

Дата добавления: 2015-07-11