Swietlan N. Kraczyna has exhibited at The Art Association of Jacksonville several times over the past 30 years. This summer he will be presenting two very distinct and different subjects: his love for music (and how this love inspires him to create visual images related to music) and his always very personal Tuscan landscapes, in this case dedicated to a special relationship with the hill town of Barga (60 miles northwest of Florence) where he has spent his past 40 summers.
In July 2013 the township (comune) of Barga honoured Kraczyna with a triple exhibition of images he has done of and for the town since 1973 (article and images here) The exhibition was held in three different locations to show over 100 works in a variety of media including drawing, etching, and oil painting. This summer’s exhibition at the Art Guild consists of highlights from Kraczyna’s Barga retrospective.
During the academic year Kraczyna lives in the Florentine countryside (in the former home of Domenico Ghirlandaio, 15th-century master painter and fresco teacher of Michelangelo), where he develops his mythological and musical themes.
Since the 1980s Kraczyna has produced four series of works inspired by music: In 1983-84, he created a suite of multi-plate color etchings based on Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (of which Kraczyna will exhibit only one here—a genesis of mixed media of the Stravinsky Dancers.); ten years later, during the 100-year anniversary of the death of Piotr Ilich Tchaikovsky, Kraczyna made a series of mixed media images dedicated to the Queen of Spades, the opera that Tchaikovsky wrote during his Florence sojourn in 1890; in 2012, Kraczyna produced approximately 30 images in mixed media inspired by the lyrics of the contemporary song Coming Up Easy, written by Paolo Nutini (article and images here) and finally, Kraczyna’s most recent series of images (2013-14) is dedicated to Franz Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet, a powerful ode to life.
Swietlan Kraczyna was born on the Polish-Russian border March 1, 1940. At the outbreak of World War the family moved westward and at the end of the war in 1945 ended up in the refugee camps in Germany. After six years, in 1951, the family emigrated to the United States.
Swietlan received his BFA degree in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and in 1962 he spent a year in Italy doing independent studies in Rome and Florence on an EHP scholarship from RISD. In 1962-64 he went back to the United States to study for a MFA degree and received a teaching fellowship at the University of Southern Illinois. In the autumn of 1964 he returned to Italy and although he lives and works in Florence in the 13th century home of Michelangelo’s teacher, Domenico Ghirlandaio, he exhibits one-man shows annually in the United States.
In 1966 his interests turned completely to the graphic world and at this time he set up the etching department at Villa Schifanoia (Rosary College Graduate School of Fine Arts) in Florence, where he still continues to teach. In 1970 Kraczyna was one of ten artists to represent the United States in the Palazzo Strozzi Biennale di Grafica, and his multi-plate color etchings are represented in the Uffizi Gallery Prints and Drawings Collection. From 1973 until 1980 he worked as the technical assistant to Marino Marini on all his color etchings.
Kraczyna has been invited to different Universities and art schools in the United States, England, Italy, Mexico, and Columbia, and South America to give demonstrations of his own multi-plate color etching technique. He is one of the founders of the “Il Bisonte” International School of Advanced Printmaking in Florence where he teaches all the techniques of color etching, and is also the co-author of “I Segni Incisi”, the first Italian comprehensive textbook on the history and techniques of etching.
