Ornament from Čataj and Veľký Grob

In terms of ethnography, the municipalities of Čataj and Veľký Grob create a small island within their region. The traditional folk costumes of the local population, Evangelicals of the Augsburg Confession, are specific because of their colours, ornamental decorations and embroidery characteristic only in these two municipalities. In the same time, it makes them fundamentally different from the costumes of the Catholic population of the same municipalities. The use of ornaments dominated in the painting of fireplaces, copying the form of the fireplace arch. The basis of the composition from which the ornament develops is a flowerpot and a plant ornament growing from a big tulip in the middle. The fireplace painting is framed by circle motifs – ornaments with smaller images of tulips, roses, hearts, and sunflowers painted inside of them. The resulting ornament is multicoloured with prevailing red vermilion, highlighted with contours. For canvas embroidery, especially for parts of folk costumes, the ornamentation had to be predrawn. For embroidery thorough the cardboard, skilled men cut a predrawn ornament out of cardboard, and women embroidered through the cardboard with gold or silver thread on a padded canvas. There were usually only two or three pre-drawers and painters, called scribes. At the beginning of the 20th century, the best-known ornament painters were Katarína Rášová, born Rášová (1876 – 1974), from Čataj, and Katarína Brinzová, born Ižová (1879 – 1976), from Veľký Grob. They produced wall paintings with Čataj ornaments at the court of the emperor Franz Joseph in Vienna, in the villa of the well-known Slovak architect Dušan Jurkovič in Brno-Žabovřesky, as well as at the Čataj exhibition within the Slovak National Museum in Martin. Their successor was Katarína Kanišová, the daughter of Katarína Brinzová. Many of her drawings are kept by ÚĽUV, they appear on many tablecloths, blankets and altar cloths. The granddaughter of Katarína Brinzová, Irena Kipsová, offered a modification of the element: her ornamentation is sparser, by which she departed from the use of dense contoured embroidery. The Čataj and Veľký Grob embroidery ornamentation technique has recently been transferred to a textile painting technique; it decorates the altar cloths of the Evangelic church; as well as the interior of the house of culture in Čataj which is decorated with murals by Mária Bagiová.