Kunt Ernő szerk.: Kép-hagyomány – Nép-hagyomány (Miskolc, 1990)
I. RÉSZTANULMÁNYOK - Olga Danglová: Tájképek paraszti lakásbelsőkben
In „salase" the country with vegetation became almost an equal visuel part of the pictorial representation of life on the sheep-farm. The younger generation of „salase" painters in the 1930s portrayed their experiences observed directly from nature in bucolic settings. Although they did not practice the painting of landscapes in their totality, they noticed some peculiarities of perspective-for example, that mountains become violet in the background and other details of natural activity. „I preferred to paint green grass. I let it grow high and thick so that sheep, the whole flock might have a good pasture. I painted such stems that mushrooms could grow well." All this illustrates that images of simple idyllic life in a natural setting were emotionally close to painters and the audience of their paintings. Their general impact on the visual culture in rural environment was. however, restricted. They were only known in a more limited area. This limited influence on the mainstream of visual culture in rural environment was also characteristic of the later paintings of amateurs who. following the folk style of paintings on glass, attempted to locate traditional.pictorial fabula in a landscape setting.' L. Kamenik, who in the 1950s and the 1960s painted pictures on glass, placed the scenes from robbers" lives in the foreground against a mountain scenery. He followed the outlines of vegetation-coniferous trees which had been already present in classical paintings on glass-with the topic of robbers, but he used the country as an illustration or sometimes even as a visuel duplicate of the scene described by the text. For the picture with the motto „From Tatra mountains up to the river Danube people whisper among themselves: Take, lord, these taxes, reckoning will come,"" L. Kamenik preferred to forgo geographical realism and painted the peaks of the Tatras covered with snow alongside the panorama of Bratislava under which, in fact, the river Danube flows as everyone knows. Both examples of creativity - „salase" and the amateur painting in fofk style indicate an increasing interest in the country as a subject for folk picture, especially during the period following World War II. At that time the differences between the city and the village were weakened by the process of culture and civilization. The village adopted more intensively than in the past the tastes of the petit bourgeoise. There occurred tapestries, dilletante paintings of landscapes, huntirg feasts, still lifes with flowers along with hunting trophies, china figures, and covers. From the visual aspect, they are connected with household objects in small towns of a similar type known from the pre-war period. In small-towns landscape tapestries were very popular at that time and could be bought in shops or ordered according to one's own choice. The tapestry technique, especially with its refined structure, could almost achieve the painter's effects - the changes in light and shadow and color perspective so that it could properly reproduce natural sceneries. Tapestries sometimes portrayed real country or an architectonic motif and thus reflected the art of the commemorative veduta. In Europe in the nineteenth century, the Swiss veduta ranked among the world's most favorite. But landscapes depicted in tapestries were more trivialized in comparison with the commemorative veduta. The landscapes were stereotyped as far as the motifs were concerned. Depending upon the well-known models the artists chose, the well-tried formulas of picturesque landscapes resulted in such classic depictions of a deer in rutting season or a mountain panorama with a red sunset in the background. These idyllically embellished sceneries gave impetus to landscape painting in rural environments. One can find such paintings in the Slovak region of Záhorie. 7 Paintings on glass were placed in the upper part of entrance gates to houses or as mural paintings located in the entrance areas of houses. 7. The large areas of entry gates and broad walls seemed too empty to the inhabitants. In the region of Záhorie, there existed a vital tradition of decorating the outer and inner walls of a house with ornamentation. Thus,
