Eating, Drinking, Singing...

  

Rustavi Folk Choir
Mirangula

Georgian Folk Songs

1998

Tracks:

01. Chakrulo (Drinking Song from Kakhetia) 5.16
02. Jvarsa Shensa (Hymn from Kartli-Kakhetia) 1.51
03. Naduri (Labour song from Imeretia) 4.34
04. Tsintskaro (Lyric song from eastern Georgia) 4.32
05. Chven Mshvidoba (Drinking song fom Guria) 2.21
06. Daigvianes (Lyric minor song from Kakhetia) 6.27
07. Mravalzhamieri (Drinking song from Racha) 3.05
08. Tskhenosnuri (Hiking song from Imeretia) 2.16
09. Chela (Ballad song from Megrelia) 3.02
10. Zari (Mourning Song from Guria) 2.57
11. Aghmosavalidan Mzisad (Church hymn from Guria) 1.49
12. Lile (Ritual song from Svanetia) 5.43
13. Odoia (Work Song from Megrelia) 4.12
14. Sabodisho (Healing song from Guria) 3.32
15. Makruli (Wedding song from Adzharia) 2.51
16. Mirangula (Grieving song from Svenetia) 3.32
17. Zari (Mourning song from the mountain region of Svaneti) 4.31
18. Khasanbegura (Marching song from Guria) 3.16

Leader: Ansor Erkomaishvili

  
Cover painting by Niko Pirosmani

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 Rustavi Ensemble 

 

was created in 1968 by Anzor Erkomaishvili, a singer and folklorist from a distinguished Georgian musical lineage that goes back seven generations. Since its formation Rustavi has successfully toured about 70 countries of the world, always receiving the most glowing comments – even from the toughest of critics.

Songs and dances for work and war, spectacular costumes, the unique Georgian style of polyphonic singing and rich voices characterize the Rustavi Choir. Their intense sacred hymns with their overlapping, continuously moving harmonies are spellbinding. Rustavi is also performing a high-quality comprising national and diverse traditional dances. Excellent costumes, brilliant performance, and elaborate choreography.

Erkomaishvili's vision was to break through ethnic boundaries of regional styles while performing ethnographically authentic music from all of Georgia. The Rustavi's performance style synthesizes the powerful, rough-hewn sound characteristic of the traditional regional folk choirs with a newer, cleaner, more finely-honed aesthetic whose orientation is towards concert presentation - nowadays on an increasingly international scale.

While striving to preserve, and in some cases recreate, authentic voicing and vocal timbres, the Rustavi singers have simplified the complex scales used by the earlier choirs in order to create firmer, more brilliant harmonies. The use of a smaller number of singers for certain songs has also helped to clarify their musical structure.

This is an ensemble, where Hamlet Gonashvili, the brilliance of the world folk music and the voice of Georgia made his flamboyant career.

  

 

In 1998, the group recorded the CD Mirangula under the name 'Rustavi Folk Choir', which has allowed for a wider appreciation of their music outside Georgia. This CD included the folk love song Tsintskaro which has had some popularity globally.

 

wiki

Rustavi home

 

Music of Georgia

 

 Georgia has rich and still vibrant traditional music, which is primarily known as arguably the earliest polyphonic tradition of the Christian world. Situated on the border of Europe and Asia, Georgia is also the home of a variety of urban singing styles with a mixture of native polyphony, Middle Eastern monophony and late European harmonic languages. Georgian performers are well represented in the world's leading opera troupes and concert stages...

Georgian folk music is predominantly vocal and is widely known for its rich traditions of vocal polyphony. It is widely accepted in contemporary musicology that polyphony in Georgian music predates the introduction of Christianity in Georgia (beginning of the 4th century AD). All regional styles of Georgian music have traditions of vocal a cappella polyphony, although in the most southern regions (Meskheti and Lazeti) only historical sources provide the information about the presence of vocal polyphony before the 20th century.

Vocal polyphony based on ostinato formulas and rhythmic drone are widely distributed in all Georgian regional styles. Apart from these common techniques, there are also other, more complex forms of polyphony: pedal drone polyphony in Eastern Georgia, particularly in Kartli and Kakheti table songs (two highly embellished melodic lines develop rhythmically free on the background of pedal drone), and contrapuntal polyphony in Achara, Imereti, Samegrelo, and particularly in Guria (three and four part polyphony with highly individualized melodic lines in each part and the use of several polyphonic techniques). Western Georgian contrapuntal polyphony features the local variety of the yodel, known as krimanchuli...

Singing is mostly a community activity in Georgia, and during big celebrations (for example, weddings) all the community is expected to participate in singing. Traditionally, top melodic parts are performed by individual singers, but the bass can have dozens or even hundreds of singers. There are also songs (usually more complex) that require a very small number of performers. Out of them the tradition of "trio" (three singers only) is very popular in western Georgia, particularly in Guria.

Georgian folk songs are often centered around banquet-like feasts called supra, where songs and toasts to God, peace, motherland, long life, love, friendship and other topics are proposed. Traditional feast songs include "Zamtari" ("Winter"), which is about the transient nature of life and is sung to commemorate ancestors, and a great number of "Mravalzhamier" songs. As many traditional activities greatly changed their nature (for example, working processes), the traditional feast became the harbor for many different genres of music. Work songs are widespread in all regions. The orovela, for example is a specific solo work song found in eastern Georgia only. The extremely complex three and four part working song naduri is characteristic of western Georgia. There are a great number of healing songs, funerary ritual songs, wedding songs, love songs, dance songs, lullabies, traveling songs. Many archaic songs are connected to round dances...

...and more in wiki

 

  

 

 

  

Niko Pirosmani 

 (Georgian: ნიკო ფიროსმანი), simply referred to as Nikala (ნიკალა) (1862–1918) was a Georgian painter...

 

more paintings 

 

nikala wiki 

 

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Josef Lada

  
Josef Lada
   
(17 December 1887, Hrusice, Bohemia – 14 December 1957, Prague)     
    
Czech painter, illustrator, cartoonist and writer. Pioneer of the Czech comicbook tradition and founder of the “Czech modern fairytale” genre. He is considered one of the greatest Czech artists of all times – which is also what the world-famous Pablo Picasso had claimed him to be. He is best known for his children’s books and for his illustrations of Jaroslav Hašek’s work. He’s an author of over 15000 illustrations (both colour and black and white) and more then 500 paintings. The main themes and motifs of his work include the following; home village Hrusice, water goblins and sprites, night watchmen, pub fights or the traditional pig-slaughter.

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On Bulls, Art & Life

A Bull

Bulls

Bull at night, Egypt

Mountains

Mountains, Ararat

Old Tblisi

Seller of greens

October in Yerevan

Fruits on the blue plate

source of pictures

Martiros Saryan

Martiros Saryan (1880-1972) was an Armenian painter regarded for his masterful selection and use of color.

Inspired by the likes of Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse and Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin, Saryan captured a sentimental slice of Armenian life in his minimal landscapes, meticulous still lifes, and bold, honest portraiture.

Saryan studied at the Moscow School of Arts and traveled throughout the neighboring region before returning to live in Armenia in 1921. After spending the second half of the 1920s in Paris, Saryan returned to the Soviet Union, tragically losing most of his work from that period at the fault of a fire on board his homeward bound vessel.

Among praise in the Moscow press, Saryan received the Order of Lenin on numerous occasions, as well as a role as a deputy to the USSR Supreme Soviet. 

wiki

Nature's ways are wonderful and unfathomable. The grain swells in the soil, the sprout grows and flowers when the time comes and then it bears new fruit and so does not die. We are like grain. We never die because we are One with Nature. To understand this is to comprehend Immortality—the Apotheosis of the Human Race. It is with this conviction that I have lived my Life. My Life is a store of my experience, a Life of aspirations, sorrows, joys and triumphs. 
(M. Saryan)

Life is an island. People come out of the sea, cross the island, and return to the sea. But this short life is long and beautiful. In getting to know nature man exalts the wonder and beauty of life 
(M. Saryan)
 

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Maria Prymachenko

Maria Prymachenko

Maria Prymachenko (Ukrainian: Примаченко Марія Оксентіївна) (1908–1997) was a renowned Ukrainian village folk art painter, representative of naïve art. The artist was involved with drawing, embroidery and painting оn ceramics.

  

Maria was a peasant woman. She was born and spent all her life in the village of Bolotnya in the Kiev Oblast, situated only 30 km (19 mi) from Chernobyl.

Іn her childhood Maria was taken ill with polio, and this painful disease influenced the girl's life. By reports of her relatives, Maria grew а thoughtful and considerate person, having compassion for nature and every living thing.

Her way in art began, by her own words, like this: "Once, as a young girl, I was tending a gaggle of geese. When I got with them to a sandy beach, on the bank of the river, after crossing a field dotted with wild flowers, I began to draw real and imaginary flowers with a stick on the sand… Later, I decided to paint the walls of my house using natural pigments. After that I’ve never stopped drawing and painting."

Creative works

Mysterious and emotionally charged, the works of Maria Prymachenko, a folk master of Ukrainian decorative painting, seem to absorb the age-old traditions of many generations of Ukrainian master-craftsmen who, from the depths of the centuries, have brought forth their understanding of good and evil, of ugliness and beauty.

Images often had арреаred to the artist in dreams and later materialized in her compositions. Maria Prymachenko's art works depict fabulous mythological beasts and take their roots іn folk legends and fairy-tales, nourished bу real life and culture of the Ukrainian реорlе.

The works of Prymachenko can be subdivided into thematic, symbolic and ornamental pieces. All compositions are characterized by a subtle and fluent rhythmical arrangement. There is a maxim: "Style makes man." As for Prymachenko, one can state this in reverse: man makes style, for Maria Prymachenko has developed a style of her own. In this evolution one can discern traces of constructivism (1930s); the victory of harmony (1960s- 1970s); and the decorative approach (1980s). Her latest works impress one by their daring decorativeness of form. Prymachenko gravitates to the world of fairy-tale and mystery: her birds, beasts and plants interact on her pictures just as harmoniously and easily as they do in natural surroundings. Philosophy of the good animates the content of her works. The good embodied in the images of 'kind' beasts and birds (lions, bears, hares, storks, swallows) is juxtaposed against the evil, this mighty force which is sometimes difficult to identify with certain living things. The artist often resorts to her favoured device of personification: she depicts fabulous animals with large eyes surrounded with a trim of eye-lashes.

Thematic compositions occupy a special place in Prymachenko's creative legacy as far as the complexity of compositional arrangement and harmonious balance are concerned. Raw actuality and fairy-tale become blended in her compositions into one single whole, triumphantly demonstrating the unity of Nature. People depicted in these compositions are composed and full of dignity and self-respect. Her early compositions were executed against a white background, associated with the whitewashed walls of peasant cottages. But in the 1970s-1980s the artist turned to coloured backgrounds. It seems that colour itself creates the effect of colour-bearing space. There are no professional secrets in her arsenal: she paints on Whatman paper with factory-manufactured brushes and uses gouache and water colours. She prefers gouache which gives a bright and thick decorative base with graphic contours. Apart from searches in colour scheme, the artist strives to achieve expressive outlines and an effective rhythmical arrangement. Another salient feature of Prymachenko's art is a keen sense of composition, which is especially evident in her choice of format. Horizontal formats are most suitable for topical and multifigured compositions depicting subsequent scenes of the narration, while the vertical format is used for representative decorative compositions.

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so, now you know where the new header comes from : )

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Family Borges

B R A Z I L I A N 
FO L K   A R T
Woodcuts by the Borges Family

  
here

Artist and poet José Francisco Borges is Brazil's best-known folk artist working in the wood-cut medium, and his work has been exhibited all over the world. But he comes out of a long tradition of folk poet/artists who publish their own work in the form of small (generally about 6" by 9") cheap chap-books or pamphlets written in verse, known as folhetos. They are also known as literatura de cordel after the way vendors sell them in the marketplace, hanging over a string. This tradition (including the work of Borges) is described in detail by Candace Slater in her book Stories on a String. Other artists working in the folheto woodcut medium include José's sons, José Miguel da Silva and Ivan Borges, his brother Amaro Francisco Borges, his nephews, Givanildo and Severino, Marcelo Soares, and Abrao Batista of Juareiro do Norte in Ceara state.

  
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