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Elzbieta Krawecka received her formal training at the Ontario College of Art and Design(OCAD, 1989-1994). She also participated in OCAD’s Off-Campus Program in Florence, Italy (1992-1993). She has been exhibiting her work throughout Canada since 1997.
Drawing inspiration from Krakow, Poland, her place of birth, and her travels in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Nepal and Canada, Krawecka’s skyscapes defy precise identifications, offering only the suggestion of a place where highways and telephone poles line the intersection between earth and sky.
With their low horizon lines, sculpted cloud formations and chiaroscuro lighting, Krawecka’s swelling skyscapes recall the compositional techniques reminiscent of Van Ruisdael’s View of Haarlem from the Dunes at Oveveen (1670). Continuing the tradition of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape paintings, where the sky fills almost three-quarters of the picture space, Krawecka’s personal take on the landscape is further touched by the quality of her own contemporaneity and nostalgia for turner’s subtle treatment of light and space, Caravaggio’s dramatic use of tenebresco, Monet’s organization of tone and pattern, and the forceful energy of nineteenth-century Polish painters like Chelmonski, Gierymski and Kotsis.
At times seeping with the rich hues of a sublime sunset or the brooding darkness of an impending storm the paintings are at once inviting and ominous to the viewer. These works serve as visual explorations of movement and space. Despite the variance among Krawecka’s skyscapes, the ultimate thesis underlying her series is the ubiquitous nature of the sky. This is to say, the sky refers to a universal space of collective, rather than individual, memory. |
