Folk crafts are a whole world combining fiction and reality, poetry and everyday labor. So the history of Mezen painting is closely connected with the life of the northern people, who invented it.
The origins of the work of our ancestors
Along the Mezen River, flowing through the territory of the Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and the Arkhangelsk Region and flowing into the White Sea, peoples have lived since antiquity, accustomed to humble the harsh nature of majestic and wild nature. The forest was shared with people by fur-bearing animals and birds, and a full-flowing river presented with fish. Horses and deer were the best helpers of man in fisheries and agriculture. All these images could not but find a place in the Mezen painting.
Encrypted Messages
Mezzan craftsmen painted wooden spinning wheels, bins, dishes, chests and boxes. What is interesting about this amazing style? From the first glance, the samples of the Mezen painting appear as a message encoded in dashes, droplets, spirals, curls and dots. Actually the way it is. Not a single line or stroke was depicted in vain, each element has its own semantic load. The graphics are restrained, but very expressive. Each drawing is concise and very peculiar, because the artist had the opportunity to combine the details inside it in different ways, there were no options to consider. The Mezen painting captures the viewer.
Elements of the picture fit into four conditional patterns: an ornament squared, in a rhombus, in an oblique cage and in a triangle. The images inside them indicate fruits and grains, seeds of cones, fire, the sun, protecting symbols, etc.
Home Among Things
Spinning wheels were the most popular items for painting by local craftsmen. Graceful and thin, they were entirely carved out of wood - birches or ate with a bend of the trunk. The surface of the spinning wheel was not primed, red figures were painted in brown-gold color, enclosing them in a thin black outline.
Mezen painting: ornaments
The specifics of the drawing on the famous spinning wheels of Mezen artists, art critics call the presence of three substantial tiers. Each of them represents worlds - heavenly, earthly and underground. Horses and deer are drawn on the lower tier, on average, birds join them, and the upper tier is filled with images of some birds. Perhaps the presence of horses and deer in the lower tier means that this is a world of not only the living, but also the dead. The horses of the ancient peoples were associated with the funeral cult. The boundaries of the tiers are horizontal stripes within which patterns are located. The highlight of these patterns is the geometric shapes that distinguish Mezen painting.
The spinning wheel was usually painted by artists on both sides. The lines of tiers on the front and back sides should be exactly the same. Thus, the masters achieved volumetric perception, which, according to researchers, likened the image to a kind of tree of life. The plots were different. From the back, they were most often devoted to everyday scenes from everyday life, while the front depicted the majestic and mysterious world of nature. Later, people began to appear in the scenes - figures of horsemen and spiders, strolling cavaliers and ladies.
Echoes of Paganism
Scientists suggest that earlier artists used not a brush, but a cutter. This explains the geometric nature of the ornament. Since ornaments in the woodcarving carried the idea of a talisman rather than decorations, they could express pagan symbolism. Paganism in ancient times shaped culture, determined the rules of human relations with nature. The symbols of the Mezen painting had a huge semantic load: they were called upon to change reality, to magically influence it.
Our ancestors elevated the elements and luminaries to the rank of deities, it is not surprising that the presence of these signs on ritual objects and household items meant something more than just a drawing pleasing to the eye. What is their Mezensky painting?
Elements of the mural having the meaning of a talisman
The sun and moon, earth and water, wind and fire in pagan terms are fundamental objects that are closely related to the good creative forces of the universe.
Sun significance
The sun in art space, the presence of solar signs had the meaning of an amulet. The tier worlds on the spinning wheels of the Mezen painting contained the image of the sun in all three rows. He was depicted as a cross enclosed in a circle. In order to convey the course of the sun in the sky, a number of circles with a cross inside were connected by smooth diagonal lines, sometimes the impression of a moving sun was achieved with the help of inscribed circle-shaped dots-spokes.
Nursing land
A symbol of fertility was the earth and seeds. Rhombuses, triangles and squares, empty inside, denoted plowed land, and dots and ovals placed inside hollow figures were a symbol of sown land. Sometimes rhombuses and squares were drawn into four or more parts, decorated with various elements in the form of dashes and curls. The grains looked like an almost round small figure or an elongated ellipse, hollow, shaded or divided in the middle by a line. The sprouting grain was painted as a drop surrounded by graceful curls on both sides. Often in the Mezen painting you can see the image of the earth warmed up by the sun and saturated with moisture, with seed sprouts - all these graphic signs fit into a skillfully created square or rhombus.
Water element
Water has long been considered the personification of a cleansing and endowing element. Not only ornaments, but also in plot images, water droplets scattered around objects are found. It was customary to depict water as a wavy line, curls and feathers. It could also be in a sky filled with moisture, then a wave-like line of water curled above a straight horizontal line denoting the heavenly firmament, and rain was drawn in the form of vertical or diagonal wavy rods. If you wanted to convey the intensity of the rain flows, then we simply drew straight diagonal lines.
The power of wind and fire
The symbolism of the Mezen painting also includes signs of air and fire. These elements mean a lot. Air is akin to the Spirit of God, which laid the foundation for all life, and fire is close in meaning to the Sun. Mezen masters marked the air with short strokes surrounding the characters. The wind was far from always a friendly element for hunters and farmers. So that he “did not get out of control” and turned from an unbridled destructive force into a subordinate and constructive one, the masters depicted him as “caught”: they placed short lines as if worn on crossed lines. The image of fire could resemble a drawing of the sun, and sometimes it was indicated by a spiral. The spiral as a symbol is used in many cultures of the world, the double spiral expresses the unity of two principles - female and male.
Lady of the night
The moon is a prototype of a mysterious force that affects the growth of plants (it is not by chance that there is a lunar calendar in agriculture). Even the night luminary has long been considered the patroness of women. In the works of northern carvers and painters, the moon in the form of a sickle is located horizontally, with its horns down. To represent the full moon, a cross was written under the sickle.
Symbolism of the animal and plant world
Other significant images of the Mezen painting are trees, birds, moose, horses, deer, snow and cold, which accompanies the life of the northern peoples for most of the year.
Artists traditionally painted Christmas trees and other trees: a vertical stick was supplied with strokes and branches, often they were bent by smooth arcs, the tree was always depicted either with roots or growing on the ground. The artist could conditionally depict coldness with a vertical line, on which perpendicular short strokes were often strung. And, of course, various snowflakes were in use.
Birds are the harbingers of happiness
Birds in folk culture promise wealth and goodness, are associated with light and good powers. The favorite characters of the Mezen masters are swans and ducks. The swan is connected with the elements of air and water, it was painted oblong, with an elegantly curved long neck. The duck indicates the cult of the sun - it hides the daylight at night under the ground or in the water so that the world order is not disturbed. She was drawn in the form of a slightly elongated circle with a shorter eyelet-neck. The body of the birds was a bright red thick brushstroke in the painting with wavy strokes that designated the tail in general. In the Mezen creations, the duck often coexists with a horse, also associated with the deification of the sun. The horse, according to folklore and pagan ideas, erects the sun in the morning in the sky.
The bird flying over the forest was the sign of the zenith of the day, it splendidly spreads its wings in smooth zigzags, droplets and curls and resembles a fabulous firebird.
Horses and deer
What are the figures of animals Mezenskaya painting? The elements of the picture are extremely simple: rectangles-torsos with powerful convex necks and wave-like curved legs. In the image of horses, manes and tails are generously scribbled. Large branches of the horns distinguish deer. Tiny spirals, dashes, circles, stars are scattered around, thanks to which a feeling of rapid movement is created: animals jump in a whirlwind of snow or dust.
The horse is the main figure in the work of the Mezen authors. It has the meaning of a talisman, symbolizes family values, prosperity and happiness. The conventionality of the image, as well as the feathers painted on the legs in the lower part, hinted at the unearthly origin of these heroes, who were especially preferred by the Mezen painting. The horse was painted red or shaded with a fine lattice, less often the contours were filled with black paint.
Deer or elk personified happiness and the emergence of something new. Touching horns with clouds and clouds, they can cause rain or storm. Usually, the artist schematically drew one expressive horn touching the back of the animal.
Synthesis of magic and art
Protective ornaments and patterns were placed on household items in order to protect their masters from evil spirits that could penetrate the house along with strangers and things. Especially zealously defended the graphic amulets that utensil, which is designed to contain the most valuable good - grain storage, chests with expensive outfits. Murals of round and oval objects repeat their shape. The lid of a tuesa or a basket is decorated with an ornament in a circle, in the center there can be any plot. The wall is surrounded by a pattern of segments dividing the image into several levels, on average - galloping horses surrounded by solar signs, wind and water signs. Above and below is a multi-element ornament with symbols of fertility.
The dishes were also provided with protective signs, because it contained what people take in themselves. Spoons and a scoop certainly had wavy water marks. The masters emphasized the similarity of the shape of the bucket with the neck of a bird or horse with the corresponding ornament. In addition, there were symbols of the earth, the moving sun, the image of a duck, a horse.
Eloquent language of color
What else attracts and fascinates the Mezen painting? The colors used by the ancient "designers", striking conciseness and emotional intensity. Of course, the main load is borne by graphics, which are distinguished by only two colors - red and black. Forming expressive contrast, they do not leave room for other shades of such an iconic painting as the art of Mezen painting.
To extract red ocher, clay was used. The powder was mixed with a resin dissolved in warm water. It was collected from larch trees. Black paint was prepared from soot, also mixed with resin. Bright red spots, bordered by strict black contours - a typical style of the Mezen artisans. They drew with a bird's feather and the macerated tip of a wooden stick.
Today
The ancient craft is still alive today - souvenirs in the Mezen style are still being created in the Arkhangelsk region. However, the technique of execution is gradually changing: the assortment of modern tools by the artist displaces the feather method of drawing. The magical sacred meaning that it was endowed with in ancient times of our ancestors also left the painting.