INVISIBLE STREAMS

   The image of a river in folk poetry is powerful. Like poetry, this image is beyond analysis, deduction or explanation. However, analyze it all you want, pick it up to the bones and explain how you want - it will not resist. But it never reveals itself until the end, always the image keeps the right to live and does not succumb to dissection, surprising its ripper with new abysses of the inexplicable. Of course, it will die after it becomes easy to understand and explain, but fortunately, this does not happen because it cannot be ascribed to the end and be understood by the rational collective mind.
   The image is alive as long as human personality. But how could there be a likeness of perception if the people are men and women, girls and boys, children and old, beautiful and not, sick and healthy, prosperous and poor, weak and strong?
    If nature is changing all the time: the heat, then cold, then rain, then snow, and life moves swiftly, and yesterday is so unlike today, and years never repeat each other.
  The river flows. It twinkles in the sun, bubbles in the rain, is covered with ice and snow, overflows, and turns into ice. Fish spawn at the meadows site, where today creaks a corncrake; not long ago, the blizzard howled. Something native, ever-changing, careless and flowing, renewed every time and never-ending, connecting the living with the already dead and yet unborn, one can imagine and hear in a stream of water. Everybody hears it, but everyone sees the image of water flowing in their way.
   The image of the road is no less prevalent in folk poetry. Yet, is it possible to agree at least briefly to think of a river as an emotional entity and the road as a rationale? After all, the former is created by nature and has constantly flowed, and people made the latter out of necessity.   
   People needed to go somewhere (albeit for mushrooms), ride (for hay), trample the trail and build the road. Often, a road ran along a river ...
    The road looks like it tried to be shorter and more accessible, while the other side of the river, for some reason, always seemed more beautiful and dry. The road made mistakes, extending its length with appearing entirely inappropriate ferries once or twice! But from these errors, the human soul has often won something more valuable and unexpected.
    Invisible streams lay present at the intersections of the material and spiritual, mandatory and desirable, beautiful and necessary. To understand this, it suffices to recall that most folk art items were essential in life as everyday objects or tools.
    Here are some of them: women's threshers, ceramic and wooden utensils, buckets, salt and pepper dispensers in the form of birds, rosettes on wooden blocks crossing, and cast and bent candelabras.
    With a natural hook of wood (carved from the spruce root ) that supported a wooden tray on the roof, the carpenter turned into a pretty chicken with few axes blows; only two or three stitches of the needle added elegance to the sleeve of the women's clothing. With a change of potter position of fingers, a clay vessel acquired impressive interception, elongated or increased in breadth.
   Elusive and uncertain is a boundary between manual labour and creative effort. The master doesn't understand even himself: how, why when an ordinary lump of clay becomes a beautiful vessel. But in all the folk crafts, there is this subtle change from obligatory, common labour to creative, unique work.
  People cannot deduct the artistic image entirely from attempts to rationalize it.
   Similarly, the nature of the transition from conventional to creative work is inexplicable. The monotony or severity of labour pushes a worker to the art, cause to diversify not only the product but also the methods of their manufacturing.
   In addition, for the Northern people, life has always been characterized by competition and competition, not by quantity but by quality. I want to go on holiday all dressed up, better than anybody else - then please spin and weave many beautiful things. If you wish to pass for an excellent possible husband and then build a durable and pretty house, do not spare the effort on the carvings and architectural gems.
   Beauty is present in work. The beauty in the fruits of labour has many faces, but it is also self-affirmation, the assertion of own ego, and the formation of personality.
  Know-how, skill, and art are alive in any work. Therefore, the artists who are equal in artistic power to Dionysus can be at the immense apex of the pyramid, the base of which rests the rest of the people.
   So everything begins with the irresistible and inexplicable desire to work.
The desire makes a person, an ethnic group, or even the entire nation predisposed to creativity and, therefore, viable. Such people are not threatened with extinction from internal decadence.
   Creativity stems from a desire to work and a thirst for action. In the life of the northern Russian peasantry, work was the most critical condition of moral equality. The willingness to work was equated with ability.
    So encouragingly generous, noble and straightforward was the popular opinion that somebody who is not lazy and willing to work with people immediately, in advance, called the craftsman. And he had no choice but to become one quickly.
 But to be a craftsman does not mean to be a master or an artist (in our modern sense). Everybody had to become a craftsman eventually. While striving for the best work, everyone did according to their strength and natural abilities. Both qualities are different for different people.
     Almost all the craftsmen became apprentices, but only part became real masters. Legends of the "secrets" that masters supposedly kept from outsiders have been invented by lazy or incompetent people to justify themselves. None of the Russian craftsmen and artisans held their skills in vain if they were genuine craftsmen and artisans!
    Another thing is that not every apprentice was gifted with remarkable abilities; meanwhile, the master was strict and jealous. He allowed getting in trade to a genuinely interested man who was patient and not big-mouthed. Typically, self-interest does not motivate the master when he shuts his mouth.
    According to ancient beliefs, people could find hidden treasures only with "clean" hands. The secret of mastery is a unique treasure accessible to honest and selfless workers. But many people judge others by themselves!
   To a greedy person always seems that the masterworks well and hard for the money, not because of a love for art.
     But, on the other hand, a mediocre and lazy person needs to understand why people can work on a small object for hours, even days and weeks. But, unfortunately, he does not have the sense to understand even the meaning of this patience, and now he insults the master with suspicion of greed and unwillingness to share his secrets.
   Master's vulnerability was also aggravated because people paid more for the beautiful and solidly made things. But, of course, the master did not refuse the money: he had a wife and children.
   The art also sometimes requires substantial resources: need to buy paint, well-aged wood, bones, etc. But it is ridiculous to think that the master or the artist is driven by selfishness!
   The paradox is that the less the artists think of money, the more valuable products they produce and the more contracts they have. Then, some artists and artisans became concerned with cash only. But the talent quickly abandoned them.
    The secret of any skill and artistry in trade is simple: Patience, hard work and excellent knowledge of the tradition. And if all of this nature adds more talent and individual ability, we will inevitably face an extraordinary artistic event.
   Art makes work palatable, but the inspiration doesn't come from the lazy. Mastery reduces the time it takes to complete work; skill is not art. Of course, not everyone can become a master. But many tried this, maybe everyone because no one wanted to be worse than the others!
   Therefore, an ordinary skill, which has yet to become unique (i.e., art), can depend on tradition. Knowledge of a practice, polished by centuries, was required for each artisan because the leap across an accumulated treasure of people is impossible. Because of that, an apprentice was valued above all the care, diligence, and patience.
   First, learning how to do things that can do all tradesmen were necessary. Only then does one begin to learn professional techniques and skills?
  Young icon painters were first allowed to mix paints and for young shoemakers to wet and knead the skin, only after a long apprenticeship was painters permitted to pick up a brush or trowel. The ability to do the traditional, standard, yet artistic skill makes masters out of traditional apprentices.
 The master, if he were endowed with natural talent and if tens of circumstances were favourable, very soon became an artist, a creator who creates beauty. Such a person would be dissolved in his painting, and he does not need fame and glory. He felt even something shameful and bothersome in the worldly fame of his paintings. Creativity and knowledge that the art will live and make people happy filled the life of an artist with a high and joyful sense.