[Outsider Art][Folk Art] Oil Painting on Board of a Rural Balkan Village Square with a Few Vendor Stalls and People Here and There

Balkans (Greece, Serbia, Croatia,...?), 1950. Fine. A charming naive painting of a small town square in the Balkans, signed by Peter with no surname (or perhaps no Christian name, as Peter could be the surname). The square has a small Church whose steeple, topped by an egg-shaped dome, not quite a full-out onion dome, together with the cypress trees, places this somewhere in the Balkans -- Greece, Serbia, Croatia, etc. The bushy downward pointing mustache of the man in the foreground, together with his hat, and the drab dress of all the other people depicted could apply to any of these places. The name of the artist could hail from any of these places, but our best guess would be Greece, especially because of the sizable Greek community in the United States. Whatever the place, we don't assume, really, that the painting was done there; it could just as easily been done in the U.S. by someone nostalgic for the old country. We consider the painting "Outsider Art" and "Folk Art" because it seems to us it was done by someone self-taught, without much, if any, formal training. While there is a child-like quality to the painting, we find it unlikely that it was done by a child. For one thing, children don't tend to work with oils, but there is a cohesion of vision, not to mention some detail, that we think would elude a child. Undated, mid-20th Century, and our sense is that it is probably from the 1950s. Painting is 30 by 39.5 cm and is unframed. The painting is showing the square in Springtime clearly, given the bright bloom of the flowers in the garden, the green of the hills beyond, and the clothing worn by everyone, their jackets and sweaters suggesting the air has some coolness still. Among the many things we admire about this painting is its bewitching colors, bright, obviously not true to actual colors yet exciting and understated at once and coming together wonderfully well. The brush strokes add to the cohesion of the painting, the sky blending into the verdant hill yet clearly apart from it, as just one example. Among the things we find interesting about the painting in terms of its subject matter is how for the most part the people aren't relating to one another. Then there are winsome details easy to miss in a quick glance such as the black cat atop the stone wall. The painting, as typical of Folk Art generally, has an ambivalent relation to perspective. We think the painting is probably showing an actual location more or less how it once was, but it might just be an imaginary square, and that would certainly be in accordance with the dream-like quality exuded by the painting. (Inventory #: 20214)