Monday, August 13, 2012

Kurbits!

Ever heard of "Kurbits?"

I've been doing some searching online for information about this topic -mainly for a lady from our church who is in the process of renovating an old coal company's office near here and she's planning to turn it into a neat little Swedish pastry/coffee shoppe/cafe type place.

And Kurbits are something that pertains to Swedish art forms and such so I've been trying to find sites that she can check out and that might be useful to her in her decorating her new shop.

In case you are wondering now though about what Kurbits are, here's the explanation about them from Wikipedia.

The kurbits is an invented, fantastical symbol of vegetal fertility based on a gourd or pumpkin of biblical legend, principally used for ornamentation in Swedish folk art and on painted furniture and domestic objects. Very popular between 1720 and 1870, particularly in Dalarna and southern Norrland, the paintings and murals have mostly biblical motifs, such as "The Triumphant Entrance of The Queens of Sheba to Jerusalem", and the people and buildings depicted are as locally fashionable at the time of painting. They were done by itinerant painters, mainly from Dalarna, who specialized in the style and whose signatures are to be found in many localities.
A Dalecarlian horse, from 1950, painted in the kurbits style
Today it is still used for decorating tourist memorabilia from Dalarna.

The picture shown is of course a Dala Horse, also another Swedish traditional form of decoration but the designs painted on the horse are "Kurbits."

I have a plate (dessert plate size) plus two coffee mugs and a small warmer type coffee pot too -all with the Swedish Kurbit designs on them and my daughters and I all love these little things that point back to our Swedish ancestry.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hello
You find more about Swedish folk Art here.
http://swedishfolkart.blogspot.se


Best regards
Leif