Nadiya Kutsa, Прикрашені будинки / Decorated houses

images are screenprints from the video in the documentation

Dzhurynska Slobidka is a small village with about 300 inhabitants in western Ukraine. 

Recently, at the end of October 2024, a short film appeared on the Facebook page of the regional TV channel Ternopil 1 in which an inhabitant told how she had provided the outside of her house and the neighbors' house with decorations.

Nadiya Kutsa, the inhabitant, was 64 years old when she was visited and interviewed by the film crew. 

She told the reporter that she started decorating her house three years earlier, in 2021. She had not done any decorative or artistic activity during her life and so there is no doubt hat she is a non-professional.  

The decorated walls evoke a special atmosphere, especially because to a large extent the stones. partly painted in all kinds of colours. are depicted as if they were in reality the constructional elements of the walls. 

These decorative stones, which completely cover the walls of the house, form a defining. basic element of this art environment.

But there are also freestanding decorative elements to be seen, such as the owl and the frog depicted above and the small cylindrical structure in the second image from the top.

The large quantity of partly colourful stones that decorate the walls are often interspersed with trees and shrubs that are provided with a green canopy. 

This art environment as a whole makes a calm, controlled impression, as if an experienced artist has effortlessly made a creation.

The neighbours house

This is equally true of the decorations that Nadya Kutsa has applied to the walls of her neighbours' house, a project she started after finishing the beautification of her own home.

Here too we see painted stones alternating with trees with green foliage, all done in a more modest style.

Apart from the video with accompanying explanation on Facebook, and the similar publication in the magazine of the TV channel, there is no other source available about these two Ukrainian art environments.

Documentation

* Video by Ukrainian TV Ternopil 1,  on Facebook, October 23, 2024

thanks to Caroline Dahyot, who pointed me to the video about these creations

Nadiya Kutsa 

Decorated houses 

No address available 

Village of Dzhurynska Slobidka,  Chortkiv district, Ternopil region, Ukraine

can be seen from the street

Adam Szubski, Galeria Rzezby Adam Szubski / Sculpture Gallery Adam Szubski

all images published here in agreement with Justyna Orlovska, 
from her website Off the beaten track

Zgon is a small village with about 150 inhabitants, part of the municipality of Piecki, located in the north-east of Poland in the Warmian-Masurian region. The village is located south of a large lake called Mokre and has a pictorial appearance, especially because of the atmosphere evoked by the many old-style houses.

The village is intersected by the national road DK58 and where this road runs right along the lake, there is a special house, equipped as it is with a sculpture garden. 

Take a look at Google Streetview, which has the scene at the location.

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The sculpture garden is a creation of Adam Szubski (1931-2008), who was born in Warsaw. 

His father, Stefan Szubski, had a job in metalworking and won many prizes in the years before the Second World War.

Adam Szubski became a stonemason, but he also worked with metal,  especially with sheet zinc, .a material he also used at that time to create works of art.

Indeed, although he had no artistic training, he showed in the 1960s that he was motivated and had a talent to create works of art. 

He was admitted as a member of the Association of Polish Artists and exhibited his work not only in Warsaw in a café on the Old Town Square, but later also in museums in for example Germany, Italy and Austria.

Szubski had married Anna Sierpińska and in 1972 the couple moved to Zgon to live in a cottage located along the national road DK58 where it runs right next to the lake. Buying the house also meant that the couple saved it from demolition because of its poor condition.

One of the first projects they undertook was to renovate the hundred-year-old house, which they did by restoring the original interior as much as possible and refurbishing and reusing what was left of the equipment from earlier years, such as old stoves and fireplaces. By doing this the house was eventually recognized as a monument

The couple was also active in projects that benefited the community in Zgon. For example, they founded an association that focused on creative activities with the inhabitants and Szubski arranged for the restoration of the local old windmill, which not only resulted in a tourist attraction. but also contributed to pumping water from the surrounding meadows.

The FACES project

In the 1990s, when Szubski was in his sixties, he became inspired by the idea to ​​decorate the garden near the house and so he began making sculptures using a mixture of cement, resins, acrylic and paint.

It became a project, called Faces, which resulted in some 200 creations, mainly of human heads.

These heads got different shapes, sizes and expressions, sometimes realistic, sometimes fantastic, but occasionally also grotesque, strange or creepy for some  people visiting the site.

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The sculptures depicted heads of famous people, friends, acquaintances and residents, but also .characters from mythology, fairy tales and literature. 

Among the celebrities were depictions of people such as Pope John Paul II (a cardinal from Poland, elected pope in 1978), Lech Wałęsa (president of Poland from 1990-1995) and Marilyn Monroe (American actress, 1926-1962).

By the way, as can be seen in the images, besides the collection of heads there are also sculptures that depict people in full length.

Adam Szubski died on November 15, 2008.

His family takes care of the maintenance of the sculptures and occasionally organizes exhibitions and workshops in sculpture

The gallery is open to visitors from May to October.

Documentation

* Article (2024) by Justyna Orlovska on her website Off the beaten track

* Article (2022) by Radosław Łabarzewscy on his website Znalezienie

* Article (undated) on website Mazury24, with a large number of photos

Videos

* Video (2004, YouTube, 0.47) by Center for Education and Cultural Initiatives in Olsztyn.

* Video (2022, YouTube, 1.41) by Znalezienie

 

Adam Szubski 

Sculpture Gallery Adam Szubski 

at No. 40 along national road DK58

village of Zgon, Miragowski department, Warmian-Masurian region. Poland 

can be seen from the road

Google Streetview

Florence Marie, La Forge / The Forge

all images courtesy of Sophie Lepetit, from her website

Honfleur is a commune in France with over 6,700 inhabitants (January 2021), located on the south side of the river Seine where it flows into the Channel. 

Situated in the middle of a block of houses in the old city center, accessible via a side street through a gate in the rue de la Foulerie, there is a building that once housed a forge, a building whose interior and exterior these days have been transformed into an art environment.

The image above shows, seen from the side of the decorated garden, the entrance gate at the end of the side street.

Life and works

This art environment is an impressive creation by Florence Marie, who was born on April 17, 1946 in Le Havre, a commune also located at the mouth of the Seine, but then on the north side, diagonally opposite Honfleur.

At a young age Florence loved reading literature and after her school years in Le Havre, she went to Paris to study philosophy and theatre.

She was active in writing and painting and had a house with a small studio on the Place Saint-Georges in Montmartre.

In 1994, in her late 40s, she moved to Honfleur, where she had found new accommodation in the former forge building which, in addition to a large outdoor space, included a 400 m2 workshop and a house with several floors.

Here Florence Marie would realise her major project, in which, after renovating a messy wall in the outside space into a large fresco, she added all kinds of colourful creations to the exterior, as well as to the walls of the rooms of the residential building.

The images above and around give an impression of the various creations

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Florence Marie, who did not have an art education, does not consider herself an art brut artist too.

She prefers to see herself as an adventurer, but an adventurer who has the books of writers such as Novalis, Virginia Woolf and Flaubert in her luggage, an adventurer who loves kings and queens, angels and symbols.

The decorations she made are certainly not small-scale, on the contrary, the creations that adorn the walls are often man-sized.

In the 2000 m² space outside there are even very large creations, mostly made of recycled material, such as the depiction of an angel of the apocalypse, provided with silver wings, announcing to a black Virgin the birth of a star child. 

And there is also a life-size giraffe hanging from the roof on a chimney, partly replacing it.

The interior of the house is also filled with a lot of fascinating creative work. The whole is a work of art in itself.

There are all kinds of sculptures, mosaic creations, stained glass cabinets, colorful furniture, painted carpets......

In one of the relatively spacious rooms inside, various events are organized nowadays, where music is alternated with dance, storytelling and the like. These are announced on Florence Marie's Facebook page.

An association Les Amis de la Forge has also been founded, which develops all kinds of activities to support and further develop Florence Marie's project.

Documentation

* Facebook

* Article on the website of the Honfleur tourist office

* Article by Marie Gratepanche on the weblog of Sophie Lepetit

* Article on the website of  the Agnes Szaboova gallery

Florence Marie

La forge

25 rue de la Foulerie,

14600 Honfleur, dept Calvados, region Normandie, France

visitors  welcome on appointment

Google Streetview  access to the side street, which leads to the entrance of the garden

Mauno Suonpää; Pahkaparatiisi / Gnarl paradise

images are screenprints from the video in the documentation

Pahkaparatiisi is in English Gnarl Paradise and Gnarl stands for: a rough, knotty protuberance, especially on a tree. Just one more step and we begin to understand what it's all about: protuberance, that's an English word that means something like a knob, an outgrowth or a washout .....

The images in this article show the characteristics of the items collected in the art environment reviewed here, namely all kinds of outgrowths of trees in particular, which have a specific shape that is so appealing that, when brought together in an extensive collection, they radiate an artistic quality.

Life and works

The one who created this art environment is Mauno Suonpää, who was born in 1932 in  Huittinen, a community of around 9500 inhabitants in the region Satakunta in the south-west of Finland.

He was raised in a house outside the built-up area of ​​Huittinen, situated on a wooded area where the Gnarl Paradise would later be located and of which it is now a part.

He started working in the forest at the age of 15, first with the help of horses, later with a tractor bought in 1956.

Suonpää did his work in the forest with an open eye for special shapes and colours that nature brought out around him. He began to see that nature produces all kinds of shapes in which you can recognize figures of people, animals or all kinds of items.

And then, at a certain moment he began to collect everything that he saw as special in the forest.

Here are some examples of what Suonpää collected.

In the image above on the left, an animal with a snout, such as a beaver, can be seen, while in the image above on the right, it appears that an owl is looking out through a hole in a tree.

In the image above, the shape of a bird is very clearly recognizable.

Nature also produces items that can be seen as letters and numbers. The collection assembled by Suonpää includes 300 letters and 75 numbers formed by nature. 

The letters include the entire alphabet, and the numbers zero through nine can also be seen.

Suonpää has made every effort to ensure that the forest with the house where he grew up has retained its original, natural character as much as possible.

He has arranged that all special trees have been given a name and a number, placed on a copper plate, which is a cataloguing that can be of importance for future generations.

His work has not gone unnoticed in public administration circles, as he has received a medal from both the President of Finland and the city of Huttinen.

The site has become an art environment

Around the turn of the century Suonpää decided to transform the forest area and the buildings with the collection into an art environment that can be visited by the public. 

To this end, the existing accommodations have been transformed into exhibition rooms and there is a modest opportunity for visitors to use a consumption and buy souvenirs.

Documentation

* Website Pahkaparatiisi

* Article on the website of the Finnish Association for rurale culture and education MSL

* Article in local newspaper My Huittinen

Video

* Video by Selkäkankaan rölli (September 2023, YouTube, 38'57")

Mauno Suonpää

Pahkaparatiisi

Suonpääntie 43

32700  Huittinen, dept West-Finland, region Satakunta, Finland

in July open every day from 12-18, in other months visits on appointment

Google streetview

Max Manent, Le musée de l'insolite / The museum of the unusual

pictures courtesy of Sophie Lepetit, from her weblog

Loriol-sur-Drôme is a commune of around 6,600 inhabitants, situated in the Rhône valley in the south of France, between Valence and Montélimar. 

In a street in the centre of this commune, not far from the town hall, there is a house with a large number of rooms, of which more than ten are lavishly decorated, as shown in the images around.

Life and works

The house named Musée de l'insolite was inhabited and provided with a unique exhibition by Max Manent (1925-2023), who was born in Montélimar, a little over twenty km south of Loriol-sur-Drôme.

Max Manent grew up in a family where the father was a nougat manufacturer and apparently a quite open-minded person, because at the age of 15 the boy was allowed to travel through France, something that was quite unusual at the time.

However, for the young man it was a pleasure to explore the world, and once he was an adult he lived abroad for a while and then he stayed in Paris, where he met many people, among whom a number of artists.

He became a painter, and he focused on only one subject: women…. Whether he followed a training course of several years to be a painter is not known.

In 1979, when Manent was in his mid-50s, he moved to Loriol, where he took up residence in the spacious house along the Grand Rue.

Settling in this house, Manent must have felt that this was his final destination, because he began to decorate the rooms he did not use for living, with all that he had collected during the previous many years

He would indeed stay there for more than 40 years, time enough to transform the interior into a special indoor art environment.

The more than ten rooms are filled with a variety of objects such as the hundreds of crucifixes in the very first image, a wall completely covered with all kinds of colorful drawings and posters, as in the image above, but also a collection of ten to twelve thousand cigar bands with special images, rare musical instruments,  matchboxes, African art .....

Manent also used a wall to exhibit some of his his own paintings

In some rooms children were not allowed, because what was shown there was not suitable for them. Manet had his own ideas about the unusual and the unexpected

A very special exhibit is the wooden coffin in which he could be carried to his grave, a coffin decorated with silhouettes of women. 

Max Manent passed away on October 30, 2023 at the age of 97.

Whether the coffin he had prepared was actually used at his funeral is not clear, like there also is no information about what's going to happen with the collection.

Documentation

* Article (2015) on the weblog of Sophie Lepetit

* Article (2012) in newspaper le Dauphine 

Max Manent

Le musée de l'insolite

28 Grande Rue 26270

Loriol-sur-Drome, dept Drome, region Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, France

currently the museum is closed

Seppo Laatunen, Ateljee Pikhahovi / Atelier Pihkahovi

pictures are screenprints from the video mentioned in the documentation

Located in the department of Southern Finland, the community of Jaala was independent, with a population of around 1,900, until it was merged with five other communities to form the municipality of Kouvola, one of the larger municipalities in Finland with over 80,000 inhabitants.

The man with the chain saw in the image above, Seppo Laatusen, has an atelier in the area around Jaala where he creates wooden sculptures, which not only decorate the studio, but are also displayed in a 0,5 hectare large wooded area near his home.

 

Life and works

Seppo Laatunen, who was born in 1938, showed an artistic disposition in his early years, which was evident from all kinds of wooden objects that he made himself at a young age. 

His mother, who had a hobby of making all kinds of drawings, recognized his talent for artistic work and she and her husband would have liked him to follow an art education, but their financial situation did not allow this.

A  nice event in Seppo's early years reveals something of his way of doing things

At the age of ten young Seppo and his brother went to help their father with logging in a nearby forest. Father sawed and split, the brothers stacked.

Mother had been given them flour, a few litres of buttermilk and some plates for lunch. When it was time to eat, Seppo cut a big hole in a tree stump to mix flour and buttermilk in, causing his father who was watching, to burst out laughing.

After primary school Laatunen went to work as a contractor in areas such as earthmoving and forestry. He was involved in draining marshes and maintaining forests.

Once an adult, he moved out on his own and bought a house in a wooded area, located halfway between the hamlets of Siikava and Hartola, close to his childhood home.

Although Laatunen made creations during his working life, he was only able to fully realise his potential when he retired around the year 2000.  In 2008 he built a spacious studio near his home, named Ateljee Pihkakov. where he could exhibit his sculptures. He also bought a half-acre piece of green area from a neighbour to display his larger creations.

The hundreds of wooden sculptures that Laatunen has created, cover a variety of themes. 

There is an interesting collection of creations that depict public figures, such as the former Queen Elizabeth of the United Kingdom and the American politician Donald Trump, above. 

Public figures from Finland. such as 11th president Tarja Halonen, and Juha Mieto, Finland’s skiing legend, just as well known personalities from other countries have been depicted also.

In the green area one can see a number of high rising sculptures that depict all kinds of personalities. some around four meters high.

Other sculptures depict animals, such as animals that live in the forest, but also crocodiles.

Most of the sculptures are of people or animals, but a small shed on the property contains a self-made wooden replica of a red car with an open roof, large enough for someone to sit behind the wheel. A surprise for a visitor when the door of the small garage is opened.

Documentation

* Article (October 2021) in newspaper MT Metsä (includes a 2.24m video)

* Article in a weblog about interesting spots in the community of Jaala

* Article on the website of the Finnish Association for Rural Culture and Education MSL

* Article on a regional edition of the Association MSL 

Seppo Laatunen

Ateljee Pikhahovi

Ahvenistontie 28, 

Hamlet Jaala, municipality of Kouvola, region Kymenlaakso, dept Southern Finland, Finland

visitors welcome

Google Streetview (with photos)