According to the folk calendar, October 31 (October 18, old style) is the day of Luke the Painter.
A day of onion, health and home equipment. People used to say: "The onion cures seven diseases. " He believed that by the end of October it was necessary to finally sort the onion crop and prepare for the long winter.
Bros' were honored by artists - painters and icon painters.
The skill of drawing images in the old days was considered honorable and rare.
Even if a child's ability to draw was noticed, it was difficult to develop them, because there were few masters who accepted teenagers as apprentices.
Usually this craft was taught by clergymen, and the workshops themselves were, as a rule, located in monasteries.
In ancient times in Bruce, for a long time, painting developed exclusively in the genre of icon painting.
And only after Tsar Ivan the Terrible, the secular portrait genre appeared - the persona, which resembled an icon.
The artists wrote on linden boards specially treated with gesso (a mixture of chalk and glue).
The colors were handmade from natural materials. For example, yellow dye was extracted from onion skins or from the bark of wild apple trees. Blueberries were used for blue color.
Green dye was obtained from aspen needles, nettle stems and tansy roots.
Black paint is made from alder bark and young black maple leaves, ripe crow berries and meadowsweet bark.
Cinnabar, a bright red pigment, was made of mercury and sulphur.
For white color use white, which is made of lead.
The work of the painters was labor-intensive and expensive. For example, painting a newly built temple cost almost half of the money invested in its construction.
With all this, sometimes they mocked the icon painters: "It's the icon painter's desire to paint Friday on a horse, and a tiger on foot," "They don't sow gods, they don't shout at them - people paint them," "If you look at the picture, you won't become a saint."
There is folk wisdom and riddles about the icon: "with his back to the wall, and his face to the hut", "he hangs quietly, but they whisper and bow to him".
traditions and customs.
- We sorted the onions, we chose the best heads for storage and planting.