Tamara Litvin, Decorated house and garden

first six pictures courtesy of Jelena Bobrusova-Davies  
(ArtNaive Gallery (Moscow) which exclusively represents the artist)

Located in the north-west of Belarus, Liozno is a small town of some 6700 inhabitants close to the country's border with Russia. One can find here a modest art environment, made by an elderly lady who during a large part of her life was a self-taught artist.

Life and works

Tamara Litvin (1932-2017) was born in the Pskov region in the west of Russia, near the border with Latvia. When she still was at a young age her parents moved to Belarus. She would spend her childhood and school years in the town of Verkhnyadzvinsk, the administrative center of the region with the same name  in the north of the country. 

After her school days she lived for some time in Ukraine, where she met her future husband, Anatoly Fomichev, who like she was from Belarus, but was conscripted in the military in Ukraine . 

The couple returned to Belarus and settled in Verkhnyadzvinsk. In 1956 they got a son and later three daughters were born.

In 1983 the family settled in Liozno, a community in the Vitebsk region, not far from the border with Russia. Their eldest son died in the early 1980s and one by one the daughters got married and left the parental home. After her husband had become ill and died, Tamara Litvin lived alone.

Throughout all the years as a self-taught artist she was engaged in making paintings, mostly in a naive style, an activity she continued after her husband had passed away.

Moreover, she embellished the interior walls with visual art and murals, decorated the exterior walls of the house with colorful motives and added two-dimensional wooden sculptures to the garden around the house, in this way transforming house and garden into an art environment.

The small wooden sculptures in the garden mainly depict animals, such as a deer, a cock or a fox.

The exterior walls of the house are embellished with paintings of flowers arranged in bouquets and with painted diamond-shaped motives comparable to those one finds on traditional Russian and East-European houses and farms.

The interior walls of the house are almost completely covered with Tamara Litvin's paintings, included some rather large murals.

Although creating art environments in particular appears to be a male activity, fortunately Europe also has examples of female involvement.

Tamara Litvin belonged to a range of women who became known by the creative way they embellished interior and exterior of their house. Although Tamara Litvin's art environment may be modest in size, conceptually it correspondents to the sites created by Polina Rayko (Ukraine), Danielle Jacqui (France), Bonaria Manca (Italy) and Enni Id (Finland).

picture (September 2016) courtesy of Igor Staferov

For a long time her visual art was only known to a small circle of family and friends. She would just give away her paintings. However, in recent years the situation changed.

In 2012 Tamara Litvin, together with artists from Belarus, Russia and Latvia, participated in the exposition of naive art Insita 2012 in Vitebsk, which was organised by local museums in cooperation with the Museum of Naive Art in Moscow (This exposition was also organised in honor of Marc Chagall who 125 years earlier was born in Vitebsk and who spent his early years in Liozno).

In 2016 she had her first solo exposition in the ArtNaive Gallery in Moscow and in the same year the gallery presented three of her paintings at the Outsider Art Fair in Paris.

On april 6, 2017 the ArtNaive Gallery announced the sad news that Tamara Litvin some days earlier had passed away

Documentation
* Entry about Tamara Litvin on the website of the ArtNaive Gallery in Moscow
* Article by Julia Poholkina (November 2011) in local newspaper Liozno News

Tamara Litvin
Decorated house and garden
Liozno, Vitebsk region, Belarus

Pasquale Paolucci, Museo di Pietra / Stone museum

pictures courtesy of Carlo Finocchietti

In the rural area outside of Frosolone, a small community of some 1100 inhabitants in the mid Italian region Molise, a small, now abandoned farm was transformed into a museum, the Museo di Pietra.

Life and works

Born in Frosolone, Pasquale Paolucci (1892-1981) from an early age worked as a shepherd. Serving in the military for eight years, he was involved in the first World War (1914-1918).

After the war he migrated to Argentine, where he stayed for another eight years. He returned to his native region in the late 1920s/early 1930s where he had inherited a plot of land in the outskirts of Frosolone.

On this plot he single-handedly built a farmhouse with adjacent barns. As a farmer Paolucci dedicated himself mainly to raising and keeping sheep.

But then, in 1935 Paolucci also began collecting stones he found in the vicinity of the farm and which in a certain way caught his attention, especially those which resembled animals and human figures.

among  the stones Paolucci collected are these, 
forming a seating in front of the farm

Petrification is a natural or induced process by virtue of which organic matter can acquire the texture of stone and from there arose ancient myths Paolucci undoubtedly knew about, that assumed that stone figures could grow under the ground, staying there until excavated by farmers working on their land.

Collecting and exposing these stones became an activity he would sustain for over 40 years, from 1935 until 1978.

Paolucci displayed the collected stones around the house and on its walls, occasionally setting them on a self-constructed pedestal of stacked stones.

In this way in the course of the years a significant collection of over a hundred stones was created, resembling mainly animals and human figures, but also other items such as what Paolucci considered a plane, a gun, a tower or a barn.

The collection became known as the Museo di Pietra.

In 1979, a couple of years before Paolucci died, the site was visited by Elisabetta Silvestrini, then director of the Museum of Arts and Popular Traditions in Rome.

She reported about the site in an article published in 1991 (see documentation). She reviews the site from the perspective of the in Italy well known phenomenon of giardini eccentrici i architettura fantastici (eccentric gardens and fantastic architecture), which she describes as spazi circostanti alla casa occupati di elementi vegetali e da oggetti costrutti dal l’ huomo, natural e cultura insieme, disposti in percorsi guidati (areas surrounding a house filled with vegetal elements and objects constructed by man, natural and cultural together, suitable for a guided walk around).

At the time of Elisabetta Silvestrini' s research and her article the concept of art environments was still unknown in Italy. Later this changed when in 2010 Gabriele Mina published his weblog Costruttori di Babele and began a successful nation wide project aimed at identifying architetture fantastiche and universe irregulari in Italy.

The Museo di Pietra was added to the inventory and although it doesn't quite fit in the art environments frame, it certainly is a universe irregulari.

Paolucci died in 1981.

His house remained uninhabited and in the course of the years the Museum became neglected and many items got lost.

Documentation

* Article by Elisabetta Silvestrini, "Il Museo Di Pietra. La Raccolta Litica Dell'Artista Popolare Pasquale Paolucci", in: La Ricerca Folklorica, no. 24, 1991, pp. 37–43
* Entry on weblog Costruttori di Babele
* Article on the website Camminare nella storia edited by Carlo Finocchietti

Pasquale Paolucci
Museo di Pietra
Frosolone (Sant'Edigio), Molise region, Italy
site is abandoned. 

itinerary on website Cammara nella storia

Anatoly Lobanov, Украшенный Дом и сад / Decorated house and garden

 pictures courtesy of Sergey Bezgodov

Above art environment, a decorated house and garden, is located in the small community of Leskhovo, some 43 km west of Moscow in Russia.

Life and works

The site was created by Anatoly Mikhailovich Lobanov, about whom little biographical information is available.

He probably was born in the 1940s or 1950s and he had a job as mechanic at a plastic factory, maybe the one in Golygino, north of Moscow.

decorated entrance

In the production of plastic items residual material is left and Lobanov got the idea to use this colorful scrap to embellish his house. He thus began in the early 1970s, a project he continued in the following decades.

Currently the house, the outbuildings, the garden and the fence are almost completely decorated with symmetrically arranged geometrical cut colorful pieces of plastic, such as circles, polygons, stars.....  

Although in the field of European art environments some sites partially include plastic items, to my knowledge there are no sites which are exclusively decorated with this material. This makes Lobanov's creation rather unique. 

Trees in the garden are adorned with circular ornaments and decorated birdhouses. Comparable arrangements are on top of poles.

Although most decorative items have a geometric pattern, some of these decorations show depictions of animals, such as a rooster on a roof, two storks on their nest or an eagle (?) as in below picture.

A pinnacle on one of the rooftops has two symmetrically placed side views of black horse heads around stylized flowers.

Less stylized is a stork in free flight, delivering a newborn (the stork attached to a line running from a roof to a tree).

this picture is a screenprint from a video by Sergey Bezgodov

This art environment, which occasionally is visited by tourists on guided tours, can be seen from the road.

Documentation

* Entry and series of pictures (2015) on Yandex

* Entry (2014) by Lisa Patrikevna, with a series of pictures on Live Journal

Anatoly Lobanov
Decorated house and garden
Leshkovo, Istra district, Russian Federation
can be seen from the street