French Folk Art

An exploration of painted decoration in provincial France. It is a combination of French culture and folk art, presenting the author's interpretations of traditional designs, such as flowers, figures and landscapes from the various regions of France.

There may be many folk artists in Canada, but there is only one integrated folk art scene: the one in Nova Scotia. Classic folk art is the work of artists who did not think of themselves as artists, who made art that they never considered to be art at all. There were no festivals, no galleries, and no touring exhibitions when they started--just a sign by the side of the road, a painted house, or colourful sculptures in the yard to attract the attention of passers-by. Today in Nova Scotia, contemporary folk art has become a distinct style, one which stresses individual creativity over collective utility. The maker, and their stories, is central to the appeal. Written by former Art Gallery of Nova Scotia curator Ray Cronin, Nova Scotia Folk Art features profiles of fifty artists--some obscure and some well known--from the first, second, and third waves of folk art. The list includes Barry Colpitts, Laura Kenney, Ralph Boutilier, Craig Naugler, Joseph Norris, and Maud Lewis. With more than 150 colour images, this illustrated guide explores the exhibitions, collections, and festivals that allowed a group of Nova Scotia artists to move their creations from the roadside to the museum, and in so doing to create its own genre: Nova Scotia Folk Art.

Folk art emerged in twentieth-century Nova Scotia not as an accident of history, but in tandem with cultural policy developments that shaped art institutions across the province between 1967 and 1997. For Folk’s Sake charts how woodcarvings and paintings by well-known and obscure self-taught makers - and their connection to handwork, local history, and place - fed the public’s nostalgia for a simpler past. The folk artists examined here range from the well-known self-taught painter Maud Lewis to the relatively anonymous woodcarvers Charles Atkinson, Ralph Boutilier, Collins Eisenhauer, and Clarence Mooers. These artists are connected by the ways in which their work fascinated those active in the contemporary Canadian art world at a time when modernism – and the art market that once sustained it – had reached a crisis. As folk art entered the public collection of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and the private collections of professors at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, it evolved under the direction of collectors and curators who sought it out according to a particular modernist aesthetic language. Morton engages national and transnational developments that helped to shape ideas about folk art to show how a conceptual category took material form. Generously illustrated, For Folk’s Sake interrogates the emotive pull of folk art and reconstructs the relationships that emerged between relatively impoverished self-taught artists, a new brand of middle-class collector, and academically trained professors and curators in Nova Scotia’s most important art institutions.

Listen to the artists of the Brazilian Northeast. Their work, they say, comes of continuity and creativity. Continuity runs along lines of learning toward social coherence. Creativity brings challenges and deep personal satisfaction. What they say and do in Brazil aligns with ethnographic evidence from New Mexico and North Carolina; from Ireland, Portugal, and Italy; from Nigeria, Turkey, India, and Bangladesh; from China and Japan. This book is about that, about folk art as a sign of human unity.