Endicott Redux

Viktor Vasnetsov

Viktor Vasnetsov (1848-1926) was a Russian painter of historical, religious, and folkloric subjects. He trained at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, and then reacted against the art establishment there by joining the Peredvizhniki, the Itinerants movement.

Much like the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in England, the Itinerants refused to confine themselves to painting polite and acceptable subjects, scandalizing 19th century audiences by depicting scenes of Russian peasant life -- much as the PRB shocked Victorian society with paintings of prostitutes and other déclassé subjects. Both the Itinerants and the early Pre-Raphaelites rebelled against the formal academy method of painting, with its adherence to rigid rules of design and a light-on-dark color palette. This younger generation of artists championed naturalism, sunlight, and a color palette that seemed shockingly bright, even garish, by the standards of the day. And both groups were influenced by the new movement for folklore scholarship that was sweeping the globe, finding inspiration in the peasant folk art traditions of their respective countries. The Itinerants were more overtly political, however, laying the groundwork for the subsequent Social Realist movement...although the PRB had their political side too, particularly in William Morris's passionate pairing of art and socialism.

Vasnetsov made his obligatory pilgrimage to Paris in 1876 -- and it was there that he began painting the fairy tale subjects that became his obsession. Returning to Russia, he continued to explore the themes of Russian folk tales and bylinas (heroic epic poems of the Slav tradition) -- and was considered by some to have betrayed the Itinerants cause with such frivolous subjects. It was one thing to ennoble peasant life (and thus champion social democracy) by referencing folk art colors and design, and quite another for a serious painter to devote his time to old wives' tales. Vasnetsov had grown up among peasants, however. He came from a highly educated family, but his father had been a priest in a small, remote village during Viktor's childhood -- thus he'd grown up hearing fairy tales from the old country storytellers, and he understood them as metaphor, as the ancient language of rural life.

In his later years, Vasnetsov concentrated more and more on theater and building design -- but even in these fields he remained true to his love of fairy tales, creating magical sets for operas and plays and championing a "fairy tale style" of Russian Revivalist architecture.

If you're heading to Moscow anytime soon, then be sure to visit the Vasnetsov "house-museum" on the Pereulok Vasnetsova. As a recent article in the Moscow News reports: "The Dom Muzei VM Vasnetsov was built by the artist in 1894 and houses some beautiful wooden furniture and tiled stoves downstairs as well as several of Vasnetsov's paintings of fairy tale characters like Sleeping Beauty and Baba Yaga in the studio upstairs. Unlike many house-museums, where the furniture has been brought in to approximate the requisite era, every thing here is original and you can sit on nineteenth century benches to admire the huge canvases in the wooden attic. Vasnetsov's pictures here are at least as good as the ones in the Tretyakov Gallery, whose facade he designed. 'A true work of art,' he believed, expresses everything about a people. 'It conveys the past, the present and perhaps the future.' "

For more information on Viktor Vasnetsov, visit the Russian Avant-Garde Gallery website. And for information on Russia's rich fairy tale tradition, read Helen Pilinovsky's "Russian Fairy Tales, Part I: The Fantastic Traditions of the East and West" and "Part II, Baba Yaga's Domain," and James Graham's "Baba Yaga in Film," in the JoMA archives. The Vasnetsov paintings above are: The Birds of Joy and Sorrow, Alyonushka, and The Tsarina Who Would Not Smile.  Below: The Three Queens of the Underground Kingdom.

 

The turning of the seasons....

Thank you, everyone, for your patience this past month while our blog went on a brief, unscheduled hiatus. And happy Winter Solstice!

The solstice has been a particularly significant one for me this year, not only marking the turning of the seasons but also the end of a long chapter of my life and the beginning of a new one. In the last month, I have sold and moved out of Weaver's Cottage, the small thatch-roofed 16th century house that has been my home in Devon for almost two decades  --  with its thick stone walls, ancient beams and floors, its enormous granite fireplace, and its kitchen covered with murals by Brian Froud, Alan Lee, Marja Lee, Charles Vess, Dennis Nolan, Lauren Mills, me, and other artists.

The "Goblin kitchen" (inspired by Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market) is the most extensively painted room, but my deer maidens, bunny girls & shadows trees can be found on walls and doors throughout the house. The bathroom (tucked under the crooked beams of the roof) is thick with poems, handwritten in gold ink and added year after year, until they covered the walls. In the courtyard garden, white roses tumble over the stone, goldfish swim in the little pond, and ivy softens sculpture by Duncan Rice ("Ariadne the Weaver") and Wendy Froud ("The Horned Woman"). Oh, how I will miss it!

Leaving Weaver's has been an emotional process; and one that, like any big change, is rife with mythic elements -- so I've written about the folkloric aspects of the move in an article for JoMA: "The Folklore of Hearth and Home."

I haven't moved far; I'm still in Chagford; and I'm moving for some very good reasons, not bad ones. Yet woven into the excitement of starting a new phase of life is a bright silver thread of sorrow: remembering all of the years that have passed at the cottage, the good and the bad, the joyful and sad. Saying goodbye to the single life I've lived there, under the old roof of straw.

I remember the day I moved in so vividly. I owned so little furniture back then that my bed was just a mattress on the floor, my living room had just a table and two rush-seated chairs, the kitchen didn't yet have its famous goblins, the garden didn't yet have a single tree or rose bush...and yet it was still the most beautiful place I could ever imagine calling my own. After the last boxes were moved in, we toasted the place with a bottle of champagne and then my friends left, and I was alone in Weaver's for the very first time. I went upstairs and found, to my great surprise, that sometime during the bustle of the move Brian Froud had snuck upstairs without my knowing and left a painting hanging on my bedroom wall: the image you see here on the right, a "faery portrait" of me (as I looked then, in my 30s). I was completely bowled over, shed a few tears, then settled down in the house that I planned to grow old in.... 

And now all these years later my path has veered and my chapter in Weaver's long history has ended. Life, as they say, is the thing that happens while you're busy making other plans.

The Journal of Mythic Arts is undergoing changes too, starting with the new format we debuted this autumn. We've got some exciting things in store for you in the new year, so stay tuned. And thank you, all of you in the Mythic Arts community, for your continued support. May all your solstice changes be good ones too.

Photo credits: The photos are described in the picture captions. (Run your cursor over the images to read them.) The two pictures of Weaver's Cottage seen from above were photographed by my neighbor Steve Dooley, from one his upper windows. The other photographs are by Alan Lee.

With a house this small and higglety-pigglety, its hard to find enough space and distance to photograph a whole room, and I've left out so much (the writing office! the studio! the books, music, and friends that brought the place to life!)...but this gives you a bit of the flavor of the cottage. Goodbye, beloved Weavers!

Myth in the City

I was back in London again this past weekend (this time for Saturday's peace march), and on our way out of the city on Sunday we stopped by one of London's most beautiful, unusual, and myth-filled sites:  the Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, the largest traditional Hindu temple outside of India.

The mandir rises like a white dream palace above the unprepossessing streets of London's Neasden neighborhood, built of 5,000 tons of Italian marble and Bulgarian limestone, hand-carved into 26,300 pieces by 1,526 skilled craftsmen. The walls, pillars, ceilings and floors of the temple are enriched by carvings, tiles, paintings and rugs depicting the mythology and sacred beliefs of a people whose faith dates back over 8,500 years. Stepping through the mandir's doors is like stepping into a place that exists outside of time, where ancient stories and modern life come seamlessly together. The city streets seem a million miles away as one sits barefoot, deep in the silence, on the carpet beneath the temple's great dome, surrounded by men, women, and children deep in meditation and prayer.

 

"From conception to completion," the temple's website explains, "the Hindu ethos for building a mandir requires that nature is appeased through various rites performed during the different stages of mandir construction. The ritual of Khatmuhurt involves the paying of homage to the land and using prayers to seek permission of the earth to disturb its natural state for construction. For the ritual of Shilanyas, the foundations are dug and below the garbhagruha a small pot containing sacraments is ceremonially placed. This creates an awareness that nature is a dynamic ecosystem and man is to live harmoniously with other life forms.

"The Hindu mathematician sees within the design a complex pattern of mathematics and geometrics that link the mandir to the universe and its component stars, planets and galaxies. Underneath the intricate artistic sculpture lies a foundation of regular shapes. The birth of geometry and numeracy arose from the need to build mandirs of perfect proportions. Traditionally, all the masonry of such a mandir is loadbearing in itself, with no reinforcement from ferrous metals such as steel in its foundation or structure. The cantilevered dome is believed to be the only one in Britain that does not use steel or lead, for ferrous metals concentrate the earth's magnetic field, which would impede meditation."

In addition to the prayer hall and cultural center, the mandir contains an extensive exhibition on the history of Hinduism, introducing visitors to one of the world's most ancient cosmologies, full of wonderful stories of gods and goddesses, of spiritual leaders and ascetics, and of captivating heroes such as Hanuman (the monkey deity)  and Ganesh (the jolly elephant-headed god, remover of obstacles).   

"Mandir is a Sanskrit word for where the mind becomes still and the soul floats freely to seek the source of life, peace, joy, and comfort," the temple guide explains. "For centuries, mandirs have been a center of life for the Indian people -- a common community place where people forget their differences and voluntarily unite to serve society." To learn more about the mandir in London (including a calendar of temple festivals and events), visit the Shri Swaminarayan Mandir website.  For more information on the Hindu faith and its traditional stories, visit the Hinduism Today, Hinduism. and Sanatan Society websites.

 

Akseli Gallen-Kallela and the Kalevala

The Groninger Museum in the Netherlands has opened an exhibition titled Akseli Gallen-Kallela: The Spirit of Finland, featuring the work of an artist best known for his paintings illustrating Finland's great myth cycle, The Kalevala. The show runs from December 17 to April 15, 2007. More information can be found on the museum's website, and the show's catalog can be obtained here.

Akseli Gallen-Kallela was born in Pori in 1865, educated in Helsinki, and moved to Paris in 1884 to study art at the Academie Julian. Like many of his contemporaries, he painted bohemian scenes of the Paris art world and cafe life -- until he began to divide his time between Paris and rural Finland, where he lived in remote villages and depicted the people and customs of the countryside. He married his wife Mary in 1890, and they traveled together to eastern Finland and northern Karelia, where he began to gather material for his Kalevala paintings in the very landscapes where the ancient stories were set. Like his friend the composer Jean Sibelius, Askeli became deeply obsessed by these magical tales, using their themes to express an ideal of "Finnishness" at a time when Finland was still part of the Russian Empire.

Askeli went on to become one of the best-loved artists in Finland's history, turning his hand to book design, interior design, textiles, stained glass, metal-work and many other forms of art in addition to painting. In 1911, he fulfilled a life-long dream by building a home and studio in the woods of Tarvaspaa, creating a crenelated castle which has since been turned into The Gallen-Kallela Museum. By the 1920s, however, the painter saw his fame begin to diminish as a younger generation of modernist artists dismissed his work as old-fashioned. Askeli moved his family to America and settled in Taos, New Mexico, where he painted scenes of Western and Native American life in addition to continuing to illustrate his beloved Kalevala. 

More information on the Kalevala epic can be found on the Virtual Finland site, on the Sacred Texts site,  and in Ari Berk's article on "The Song of the Sampo" in the Endicott archives. You'll also find it on A Europe of Tales, a web project sponsored by the Gallen-Kallela Museum. The intention of the project is to use multi-media technology to present European myths and legends aimed at an audience of children aged ten to fifteen. The stories are produced in eight languages: Finnish, Swedish, English, Gaelic, French, Breton, Icelandic and Italian.

I recommend The Lemminkäinen Suite, symphonic music based on four legends from the Kalevala by Jean Sibelius, and Kalevala: Dream of the Salmon Maiden, a CD of music and song (in Finnish and English) by Ruth Mackenzie. You can also listen to "Kalevala" and "Out of Finland," two excellent programs from Ellen Kushner's Sound & Spirit radio series, by going here.