“Peace to the world, and glory to the Lord”. On some motifs of Lyubov Maykova's works

The works of L. M. Maikova are one of the most striking pages of Russian naive art, which we understand as the work of people of folklore consciousness beyond the genres that exist in folklore consciousness. But in oral folk art, there are works that resemble the poetic compositions of non-professional authors (poetic memoirs, letters in verse, poems with soap opera plots). And painting as such is absent in folk art. Therefore, the pictorial material makes it possible to most clearly differentiate naive amateur creativity and primitivism as a style of author's professional creativity. Naive creativity is not a form of leisure activity, which presupposes the existence of leisure organizations and their management. Naive creativity is a form of leisure practice that denies leadership and any organizational forms. As a phenomenon of leisure practice, naive creativity ceases to be anonymous, becomes authorial and competitive, which means that it becomes art. In Maikova's paintings, as the works of a naive artist, the role of verbal text is higher than in the works of a professional author, so the title is placed in the visual space of the painting itself and performs the function not of the textual frame, but of the text itself. Finally, in the work of a naive artist, ideological layers of different origins are organically combined, sometimes even opposing each other.