The Nature of the Folk Arts

As Ingrida and I travel through Northern and Eastern Europe during the summer we search for folk art for the store. True folk art goes beyond simple well-done crafts. In its best form, a folk art piece becomes an artifact whose basic nature must combine cultural authority, authenticity, and transformation.
In Northern and Eastern Europe the makers, specifically the designers, of the applied arts of leather work, textiles, metal work, woodwork, ceramics and jewelry are held in high esteem. Often they have been raised on traditional form and encouraged to find from it the wellspring of the new.
Likewise, it is within traditional form that a folk artist is raised. They simply do not leave it. The “new” for them becomes a way of re-perceiving the traditional, of using the traditional to aid the present.
It is the spirit of the folk artist that actually begins the creation of a folk piece. It is a spirit that knows tradition. One which goes beyond the simple possession of that knowledge by applying it in a masterful form. Through it all, the continuity of the past must be validated and embraced and the reality of one’s time incorporated. Folk art is a living thing.
The master folk artist in Northern and Eastern Europe is not an “outsider” artist. Rather, he or she has a job where they must, again and again, enter into a larger whole. Continuity with the past and community with the present gives the folk artist a foundation of identity.
In all the folk artists we have met, it is this immersion in the continuity of a people, through the history of their craft that sets them apart from a regular artist.
Often, the great folk artists don’t see themselves as artists, nor do they live easily with that adjective applied to them. Instead of judging their work as good or bad, they judge it as right or wrong… as correct.
Cernavskis, among the greatest of Latvia’s Latgalian ceramicists, Galkins, ranked as a great goldsmith, Romulis, Latvia’s premier amber master, and Kalnina, an archaic bronzesmith, have risen to such recognition by the very regard of Latvia’s people.
Their commitment has given them an authenticity. To their authenticity, the people have granted authority.
The mythological markings on a wood-fired vase, on a wedding sash, on a maiden’s crown, on a child’s hanging crib, or on an old man’s bronze bracelet, speak of a larger world.
The color, the shapes embracing form, the pattern of ornamentation, the number of repetitions and divisions, speak of a larger, greater world, and one that has been handed down, through training and inheritance.
Yet it is in the very human world that such “larger” things have always been made, with fire and earth, with water, plant and stone. The folk artists are these makers. One after another through time.
As Ingrida and I travel, we don’t look for the famous. We seek those whom the people turn to when the common world becomes a world of celebration or sorrow.
We don’t look for the large and boastful, rather we look for the convincing.
We look for something alive in the moment, which has the power to transform the moment, and touch its gentle rapture to a larger story.

--Sean McLaughlin, 2004.