Nikifor Krynicki, Church

watercolor, pencil, crayon, paper, 34.5 x 24.5 cm in the field of composition inscriptions: top: 300000 / Pólitra; at the bottom: ZAKOPA
provenance: private collection of Ewa Pape, USA; private collection, Warsaw Interest in color, experiments with perspective and small size of works are characteristic of Nikifor's work. The material for the artist's work could be anything - old official prints, pages from a notebook, food packaging or pieces of cardboard. It is this economy of material that is the reason for the frequent double-sided use of a sheet of paper. The artist's first drawings make visible his work on his own technique - erasures, eraser marks, plotting axes of symmetry. A subject Nikifor was keen on was the Greek-Catholic Orthodox Church, as can be seen, for example, in the so-called Sketchbook of Architecture. In addition to landscapes with an Orthodox church, Krynicki was most eager to immortalize what was closest to him - landscapes of Krynica, to a lesser extent of Kraków and Warsaw, portraits of friends and passers-by. A frequent motif that we can find in his works are railroad tracks and railroad stations, most often shown against a landscape background. His awareness of himself as an artist is confirmed by his numerous self-portraits, in which he depicts himself as a painter at work, contemplating the surrounding space. He most readily used watercolor and gouache, and did not shy away from tempera and oil paint. Crayon in his works appears most often in the late period of his career. He contoured individual architectural elements and figures with a black line. The color scheme is simple, reflecting the natural character of the environment. Despite the use of primary colors, without toning or gradation, he achieved remarkable realism in his works. Nikifor left behind several thousand works (according to some sources, even about 40,000). Most of them he sold for a penny to, as he himself wrote, survive.