Folklore and Folk Art

Fairytales & Folk Art

The word “folklore” was first used by the English antiquarian William Thoms in a letter published in the London journal The Athenaeum in 1846. In usage, there is a continuum between folklore and mythology. Stith Thompson made a major attempt to index the motifs of both folklore and mythology, providing an outline into which new motifs can be placed, and scholars can keep track of all older motifs.

Folklore (or lore) consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales, stories, tall tales, and customs that are the traditions of a culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The study of folklore is sometimes called folkloristics, and people who study folklore are sometimes referred to as “folklorists”. 

Folk art encompasses art produced from an indigenous culture or by peasants or other laboring tradespeople. In contrast to fine art, folk art is primarily utilitarian and decorative rather than purely aesthetic. Folk Art is characterized by a naive style, in which traditional rules of proportion and perspective are not employed. Closely related terms are Outsider Art, Self-Taught Art and Naïve art.

Traditional Folk art 

Antique folk art is distinguished from traditional art in that, while collected today based mostly on its artistic merit, it was never intended to be 'art for art’s sake' at the time of its creation. Examples include: weathervanes, old store signs and carved figures, itinerant portraits, carousel horses, fire buckets, painted game boards, cast iron doorstops and many other similar lines of highly collectible "whimsical" antiques.Contemporary Folk art, and styles and motifs, have inspired various artists. Pablo Picasso was inspired by African tribal sculptures and masks, while in Russia Natalia Goncharova and others were inspired by traditional woodcuts called luboks. In music, Igor Stravinsky's seminal The Rite of Spring was inspired by paganism.

I have chosen to look at folklore and folk art as i think it is very relevant to fairytales as many fairytales are and updates version, modernised through time. I find the designs very interesting as they as so intricate, i would like to do my books in this same style. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_art