Traditional and Glass Painting

The folk artistic creation also knows plastic art expressions: the icon dyeing (on wood or glass painting), the egg coloring as well as the mask manufacturing.
Painting on wood, a traditional peasant art, has been widespread in Romania since the 17th century and remains popular today.
Bucovina's painted monasteries were the first in the world to be adorned with frescoes on the outside.

Icon Dyeing
The icons' manufacturing has common sources for all the three historical regions, being directly bounded to the art of Bysantine and Oriental tradition. The icon never misses from the traditional Romanian house. Well known as a worship object, it also has a decorative purpose. The icons' manufacturing on wood made in the Bysantine style, uses formulas transmitted over the generations and demands time to be completed. Another way of making icons, is the glass painting. Today, the icons' evolved from the naive form to an elaborated one. In a monastery near Cluj, the painted icons' started during the 18th century as a result of the engravings' interpretation. This kind of religious art became so popular that soon entire villages specialized in this art. As it got abroad in the folkloric domain, the glass painting started to represent the rural life as well as the village's values.

Both the icons we meen the wood and the glass painting have common iconographic origins, traceable in the Byzantine iconography consolidated in the Orthodox Christian milieu to this day. The Byzantine iconographic motifs have been preserved by the peasant icon painter to a large extent, but the interpretation thereof is creative, through the introduction into the religious thematic range of folk, anecdotal, or even jocular themes emerged from the observation of village life. Therein lies the iconographic individuality (and originality) of icon artisans in a traditional Romanian society imbued with holiness, yet conserving a mode of thought prone to rationality.

The art of icon dyeing on wood was materialized especially in monasteries, in the monks' workshops, while icons made by glass painting was more widespread in the Transylvanian villages, the icon artisans' main occupation being agriculture. Their craft was transmitted in the family from generation to generation, along with the custom, models, and secret techniques. Some of them even founded schools for glass painting and their talent took them out of anonymity and the modesty specific to a religious spirit, a nameless painter of saints.

The art of making icons followed, consequently, three major directions: interpretations of the monasteries' frescoes and old engravings, replicas to the traditional icons and images from the local habits and the occupations. The beauty of the Romanian icons made trough glass painting lies especially in chromatics, which offers a harmony of colors of amazing subtleness.