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   It's important to consider the difference of types and genres of the primitive art of the XVIII - XIX centuries: lubok differs greatly from the provincial aristocratic portraits. Naive art requires another approach: it doesn't really matter what media is used by an amateur artist - oil or watercolour, his inner world is much more important for us to learn. Let's try to do the extracting of the major archetypes of the naive artistic mentality.
   Let's start our journey to this magic world with way. The way, taken in a broad sense (street, river, lunar-path) is a universal media for making an illusion of the perspective. Why did the amateur painter choose that particular landscape with a bridge and a road? Perhaps he was attracted by an easy and effective way of linking fore- and backgrounds and thus to alter perspective depth to the simple scene at the river-side. Due to the even lighting an ordinary Middle-Russian landscape acquires significance and completeness.
   Many of the naive painters tend to the same motives: trees, bushes or groups of houses on both sides and a path or a road, river or spring, telegraph-poles or a rail-way, sunset or lunar-path reflected on the water running from the foreground to the depth of space. Having pained the landscape of this kind Alexander Suvorov accompanied it with his comments: "The foot-path to the river, the lodge on the opposite side", - determining the succession of the spectators' journey within the picture.


Nazarov Alexander Georgievich. 1909-1991. Nizhny Novgorod region
At the River. Reshetikha Settlement. 1984
Oil on cardboard. 62 õ 85
Private collection



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