Folk art

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 naïve style, in which traditional rules of proportion and perspective are not employed.

As a phenomenon that can chronicle a move towards civilization yet rapidly diminish with modernity, industrialization, or outside influence, the nature of folk art is specific to its particular culture. The varied geographical and temporal prevalence and diversity of folk art make it difficult to describe as a whole, though some patterns have been demonstrated.

Characteristics

Characteristically folk art is not influenced by movements in academic or fine art circles, and, in many cases, folk art excludes works executed by professional artists and sold as "high art" or "fine art" to the society's art patrons. On the other hand, many 18th- and 19th-century American folk art painters made their living by their work, including itinerant portrait painters, some of whom produced large bodies of work.

Donna Dewberry

Donna S. Dewberry (born November 6, 1953) is an American Mormon artist and author. She claims to have developed a "One Stroke" painting technique that will enable anyone to reproduce any effect of nature with one easy-to-learn technique.

Personal

Dewberry is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Television

She has a public television show, One Stroke Painting with Donna Dewberry. In 2007, One Stroke Painting was replaced with The Donna Dewberry Show.

One Stroke Technique

The "One Stroke Technique" is a double loading technique that consists of loading a brush with two separate colors. Dewberry claims that with her technique you are able to achieve the shading and highlighting in one stroke .

As a side note, from the Archival records and articles in the UK, it is known that the Schools of Art of the time (1700's) took apprentices and trained them, in either the 'one-stroke' style required for decorating furniture, or the 'one-stroke' style required for decorating pottery. (Those not able to afford the School of Art costs, spent years learning from the Master Painter within a firm). The brushes (paint brushes are called pencils in the Pottery trade) were 'double' and 'triple' loaded, to produce the highlight, body colour and shadow, of the petal, leaf or element, painted wet-on-wet and with a single stroke of the brush. This quick method of painting was used for commercial reasons - to speedily decorate the furniture, pottery and trays ready for sale. So, although the brush carried one, two, three or more colours, it would have taken only 'one stroke' of the brush to produce the more complicated shading, giving depth and beauty to the design. It would have taken much longer to blend these colours together had they been added separately.