Verbal and visual narratives of naive artists

Abstract

Until recently, studies of the fine art of naive artists and of texts of naive literature were conducted separately, independently of each other. At the same time, it is well known that many naive artists create various kinds of literary texts: stories, scripts, poems, memoirs. This article sets out the neccssity of an integrated approach to the works of naive artists. It offers an analysis of the meta-text of their visual and verbal works as an expression of the non-stop process of understanding the world and their place in the world, clarifying their own identities and the identity of their social group, building up narrative about the meanings and purposes of lives. The article contains brief essays on several naive artists (E. Bartsev, P. Ustyugov, A. Chepkasov) that attempt to evaluate the relative weight of the visual and verbal portions of their heritage. Supplementing stylistic and compositional analysis of naive art works with a study of their author's fictional and non-fiction texts leads us to understand the naive artist's social mission, which forms his naive utterance. This method allows us to test the hypothesis of naive art as an individual reading of the mass culture's metanarrative. We envisage as the next step a detailed, step-by-step study of this topic, which would necessarily include collecting all available materials created by naive masters, studying the great diversity of their creations, and clarifying the balance between heteromorphic creative spheres.