Elzbieta Krawecka

Elzbieta is a Toronto based artist. Born in 1971 and raised in Krakow, Poland, where she absorbed the European time-honoured traditions she developed an eye for old world aesthetics, subsequently living in Kuwait exposed her to different cultures giving her an appreciation for travel, and by moving to Canada to attend the Ontario College of Art and Design, she developed a love for the Canadian landscape. This background is strongly reflected in her work as an oil painter.

Her painting style is a personal exploration of the transient nature of light and its potential to describe space in terms of movement. Based on the Old Masters glazing techniques, it is inspired by the 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 Kotsi.

Elzbieta uses thick and opaque paint, often applied with a palette knife, alongside translucent glazes of thinner washes. While experimenting with the technique and continuing to pursue travel, which inspires her work, she strive to continue pushing the boundaries of landscape painting and developing her own contemporaneity.

Perhaps as a natural response to the vastness of the North American continent (coupled with the vacuity of the Kuwaiti desert), her paintings depict large areas of open spaces such as skies or water, defined by pattern formations.

Within these paintings, movement and space pose a question which pertains to entering a work where place and time are undefined. What is required is something personal; a thought, a color, an ephemeral quality of sunlight… a timeless sky as a universal space of collective memory.