- Stan Ioan Pătraş
Stan Ioan Pătraş (1908—1977) was a
Romania n wood sculptor, the creator of the tombstones in theMerry Cemetery inSăpânţa ,Maramureş County .His creations fit harmoniously within the local popular arts and in the old Romanian tradition.
Biography
Stan Ioan Pătraş was born in 1908 in
Săpânţa commune,Maramureş County (then inAustria-Hungary ) in a family that had a long tradition in wood sculpting. Even from his youth he was attracted to sculpture, painting and poetry and at the age of 14 he started to sculptoak crosses.In 1935 Stan Ioan Pătraş, then an anonymous sculptor, started to carve onto the tombstones small poems written in the first person: ironic poems, with grammatical errors very close to the archaic language the locals spoke. At the beginning he carved only 10 tombstones a year using oak as the base wood.
By 1936 he had already perfected his style: the tombstones became narrower, he started to paint
relief figures on them using bright coloures obtained from naturalpigment s. The main colour he used wasblue , a specialblue named by experts Săpânţa blue. The other colours were also symbolic in their unique way:Green -life ,Yellow -fertility ,Red - passion,Black -death .Until 1977, Pătraş made almost 700 tombstones in the two
graveyard s inSăpânţa , later known as theMerry Cemetery .He died in 1977, leaving his house to a disciple, Dumitru Pop, who chose to live in his master's house, and later turned it into a
workshop and amuseum .External links
*ro icon [http://www.adevarul.ro/articole/s-x103-p-n-x163-a-este-izolat-x103-dar-nu-trebuie-ocolit-x103/188887 www.adevarul.ro]
*ro icon [http://www.agero-stuttgart.de/REVISTA-AGERO/PROZA/La%20Sapanta%20de%20ELP.htm www.agero-stuttgart.de]
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